Embracing Neapolitan as a Language Which Is Key to the Reconstruction of Early Romance

Despite being the second most spoken language on the Italian peninsula, Neapolitan has been overlooked in some of the more important comparative linguistic studies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A survey of these studies suggests the preference for: 1) national languages, in this case, Italian, 2) languages that possess comparably the largest number of speakers, especially those that have swelled exponentially for reasons of immigration, as in the cases of Spanish, Portuguese and French; or 3) insular languages such as Sardinian which, despite its relatively low number of speakers, appears to have been included because of its sequestered history and the inevitability of differently evolved forms. The reason for this study is to demonstrate that because of exclusion among the ranks of other more elite languages, certain key structures of Neapolitan have been overlooked as potential exemplars of earlier forms of Romance. This paper suggests reasons for why the exclusion of Neapolitan in previous comparative language studies has only served to obscure the relevance of other factors that are key to the reconstruction of early Romance. The paper will also provide specific examples from the Neapolitan lexicon that serve to demonstrate how this variety conserves early forms of Romance.