The inhabitants of the town speak an Italoromance language, belonging to Southern Italian dialects, which they refer to as
Sandəmarchesə. The term
dialect, however, is not used with the meaning of
variety of the Italian language, but refers to linguistic systems independent from Italian, i.e.,
languages. Both Italian and Southern Italian languages are in fact daughter languages of Latin, with the exception of non-Romance ones, such as
Arbëresh, by instance.
Phonetics and phonology As many languages of Southern Italy, Sandəmarchesə makes an extensive use of the
schwa: The schwa can occur both word-internally and at the end of a word. The final-word schwa can represent gender-neutral plural morphology: On the other hand, it can also represent masculine singular morphology. Endings for masculine singular and for the plural are thus often syncretic:
Metaphony plays an important role in the language in that it can specify gender distinctions: The language employs phono-syntactic doubling for word-initial consonants following a vowel.
Syntax Sandəmarchesə is a SVO language. Adjectives always follow their head noun, except for quality ones (
beautiful,
big,
etc.) The language employs two sets of possessives. For non-kinship nouns, the possessive is a post-nominal free element. For kinship nouns, possessives are of the
enclitic type. As in other languages, kinship nouns are not articled. Possession can be realized with two different constructions. One is prepositional, the other one is aprepositional. The difference between the two lies in the definiteness features of the nouns: ==Twin towns==