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My family comes from Torella del Sanio, in the Campobasso province of Molise. I learned standard Italian in school and I have difficulty understanding my family when they speak the dialect.
Is there a name for this dialect, or any way to find out more about its history and how its grammar and vocabulary differ from standard Italian?
First of all you need to clarify whether your relatives belong to any linguistic minority in Molise (Croatian? Albanese?): in that case that would not be Italian at all. Otherwise, chances are that your relatives speak Molisan dialect, probably Campobassan dialect.
You can read something very basic here and here: it is probably a starting point (since the differences with Italian are very many, I will not summarise them here, please refer to the sources cited at the links above).
