Language, Materiality, and Digital Neapolitanitá.

Southern Italian digital humanist Domenico Fiormonte has argued that DH is...a discipline and academic discourse dominated materially by an Anglo-American èlite and intellectually by a mono-cultural view and has repeatedly called for a digital humanities that improve[s] and cultivate[s] the margins...[giving] more attention [to] variegated cultural and and linguistic cultural diversity. Similarly, Crystal Hall points out that both the Digital Humanities and Italian Studies have struggled with inclusivity and the representation for traditionally marginalized voices...[though] both fields offer tools and materials of study that can assist in [a] transformation. This article takes up the work of these scholars in its investigation of the Neapolitan language on YouTube. According to UNESCO, the Neapolitan language is a vulnerable language because the number of speakers has been decreasing steadily in Southern Italy, forecasting the eventual extinction of the Southern Italian language. UNESCO's categorization of Neapolitan as vulnerable is problematic because it only accounts for speakers in Southern Italy and not in the Italian diaspora, which involves a physical relocation of Neapolitans to other parts of the world such as Australia and the United States. It is also problematic because it indicates that Italians either in Italy or in the diaspora may no longer want to speak Neapolitan. A Neapolitan digital diaspora, unaccounted for in UNESCO statistics, also exists on social media, which may include Neapolitans in Italy and abroad but also may include first-generation Italians, heritage-language speakers, and other-culture people fluent or familiar with the language. In this article, I explore how usages of Neapolitan-Italian language on YouTube might counter the linguistic and cultural subordination of Neapolitans. This article explores how usages of Neapolitan-Italian language on YouTube might counter the linguistic and cultural subordination of Neapolitans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]