To us Italians, the word
dialect has a negative connotation, 90% of the times.
To explain why, I need to be very thorough. To talk about history.
As you guys know, Italy did not exist, before 1861 (national unity):
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As a consequence, in these states (which were considered countries), several languages were spoken by the people.
Nevertheless, during the Renaissance the Italian language ( created almost artificially by Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio in the 13th- 14th century), was already considered the literature language
par excellence, meaning that poets, artists used it in their works.
An academy was founded to preserve the purity of this language. And they succeeded it.
It remained almost unchanged.
But from the 13th to the 19th century it remained the language of the liberal arts élites.
Italy's national unity took place in a very quick and traumatic way. It was a too fast exit from the "Italian Middle Ages".
The new Italian state was very nationalistic and authoritarian, so it imposed the Italian as the only language allowed in any building of the public administration. Justice, education, etc...
So...in order to impose Italian, the word dialect started having a very negative connotation, since the aim was to diss those who would not learn Italian, but still spoke a dialect.
Nowadays dialects still exist.
The Italian school does anything to discourage people from preserving them.
A person who speaks dialect in school can never be accepted. The teacher will fail them.