Indexicalities of Language in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels: Dialect and Italian as Markers of Social Value and Difference

Abstract

Across her Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante uses the language choices of her characters as a compelling narrative device, exploiting the rich semiotic potentials of Italian and dialect to situate characters in time and space, enhance the emotional stances of those characters, and highlight the conflicts among friends and kin that drive her narrative. This chapter uses the concept of indexicality as elaborated in linguistic anthropology to analyze how Ferrante depicts the language choices of her characters to situate them in time, space, and social context. In drawing attention to language choice, Ferrante exploits patterns of meanings associated with Italian and dialect, patterns that emerged out of the centuries-old “questione della lingua” (language question) and took particular shape in twentieth-century discourses about language in Italy.

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