Raccontare la Grande Guerra in dialetto: l’ultima proposta di Ernesto Monaci per l’insegnamento dell’italiano nelle scuole

Ernesto Monaci’s personal archive bears witness to the philologist’s interest in the teaching of Italian. In favour of teaching the language from the dialect (the mother tongue of the majority of Italians) using a contrastive approach, the scholar entrusted his papers with important reflections on the subject. The article examines some unpublished private writings from the years of the First World War, in which Monaci, in the context of a fierce ideological conflict with the Habsburg Empire, proposed an anthology of stories written in dialect by soldiers at the front. Aimed at schoolchildren, the anthology would have the twofold purpose of instilling a sense of patriotism in young students and providing them with linguistic models to practise translating into Italian.