Neapolitan language
Southern Italo-Romance dialects spoken in southern Italy
Neapolitan (autonym: ('o n)napulitano [(o n)napuliˈtɑːnə]; Italian: napoletano), is a Romance language of the Italo-Dalmatian branch spoken in most of continental Southern Italy. It is named after the Kingdom of Naples, which once covered most of the area, and the city of Naples was its capital. On 14 October 2008, a law by the Region of Campania stated that Neapolitan was to be protected.
While the language group is native to much of continental Southern Italy or the former Kingdom of Naples, the terms Neapolitan, napulitano or napoletano may also instead refer more narrowly to the specific variety spoken natively in the city of Naples and the immediately surrounding Naples metropolitan area and Campania region. The present article mostly deals with this variety, which enjoys a certain degree of prestige and has historically wide written attestations.
Distribution
Largely due to massive Southern Italian migration in the late 19th century and 20th century, there are also a number of Neapolitan speakers in Italian diaspora communities in the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, and Venezuela. However, in the United States, traditional Neapolitan has had considerable contact with English and the Sicilian languages spoken by Sicilian and Calabrian immigrants living alongside Neapolitan-speaking immigrants and so the Neapolitan in the US is now significantly different from the contemporary Neapolitan spoken in Naples. English words are often used in place of Neapolitan words, especially among second-generation speakers. In Naples the effect of Italian on Neapolitan has been similar due to increasing displacement of Neapolitan by the national language in daily life.
Classification
Neapolitan is a Romance language and is considered as part of Southern Italo-Romance.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Neapolitan language” is southern Italo-Romance dialects spoken in southern Italy. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Neapolitan, language and Southern, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q33845. Authority coordinates are 41.000, 14.000. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Neapolitan language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.