Milanese (milanes, milanées) is a Lombard language variety (often but ambiguously referred to as a dialect) spoken in the city of Milan and its surroundings.

Like all other dialects of Lombard, Milanese is a Western Romance language related to French, Romansh, Italian, etc.

As per today, Milanese does not have any official status either in Milan or anywhere else: the only official language in Milan is Italian.

Various dictionaries and a recent translation of the Gospels are available.

Orthography

Partly because of the unofficial status of Milanese, several different orthographic conventions have developed.

The oldest still in use, and probably the most widely used, is the convention adopted by the Milanese writer Carlo Porta . Typical of this system is the trigraph oeu for the vowels /ö/ and /ö/.

More recent conventions often try to

• simplify the rules (which are sometimes not very immediate in the Porta system)
• make correct reading of Milanese easier for native Italian speakers
• reduce the gap between the written forms of Milanese and of other Lombard dialects

A lot of the alternative systems use ü and ö instead of u and oeu, in order to avoid confusion between Milanese and Italian vowels. They also generally reduce the number of accents involved, often removing ^.

A comparison with Italian

There are so many differences between Milanese and standard Italian that a comparison between the two may be deemed questionable. However, the comparison is made quite natural by the fact that speakers of Milanese are usually also speakers of Italian.

• More vowels are found in Milanese than there are in Italian. In particular, Milanese adds /ö/, /ü/ and others; moreover, vowel length plays a role in Milanese.
• While almost every Italian word of more than one syllable ends in a vowel, consonant endings are extremely common in Milanese. A consequence is that many words that are stressed on the penultima in Italian become stressed on the ultima in Milanese.
• While Italian subject pronouns derive directly from their Latin counterparts, subject pronouns in Milanese derive from Latin dative pronouns. This makes Milanese subject pronouns resemble Italian object/dative pronouns: mi (Italian mi), ti (Italian ti), lu (Italian lui), lee (Italian lei), numm (Italian noi), viálter (Italian voi), lór (Italian loro).
• Subject pronouns are doubled in the 2nd and 3rd persons singular. Singular "you are" (Italian tu sei) becomes ti te seet in Milanese; here the first ti is the actual subject pronoun (which is optional), while the second te, normally a dative pronoun, is used to reinforce the subject and is compulsory.
• The negation is postponed after the verb. This means that where Italian has non sei for "you are not", Milanese allows either of ti te seet no or ti te seet minga. Minga is an alternative negational adverb (probably derived from the Latin word mica, meaning "crumb"), various forms of which are common in other Italian dialects and even Italian itself, where non <verb> mica is common slang for reinforcing negations. Also consider French pas and Tuscan punto for examples of negations made by using words that all designate "something small" generically. Statistically, minga and no are about equally as common in Milanese, and they are usually interchangeable, although a Milanese speaker will sometimes find that one "sounds better" in a sentence than the other.