Lila has the capacity to code-switch as much as Elena, but they do so for vastly different reasons. In her daily life Lila has no need for Italian; her vernacular is dialect, and only in polite company does she use standard Italian to show she has a grasp of an elevated subject, using elevated language. But she doesn’t use it fluidly – her Italian can be somewhat fusty or too literary.
Elena, on the other hand, by the time she is thirty or so, resorts to dialect when she is under duress or attack. She’s lived among the intellectual class since Pisa, where she diligently applied herself to blending in. Yet there she first discovers the power of her dialect. When a female acquaintance at the Scuola Normale accuses her of stealing, she slaps and insults her in dialect, and the girl backs down.
Elena refers to other occasions in her marriage when she insults Pietro, but she uses reported speech and does not specify that she has mixed dialect words in with Italian (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, chapter 121). Also, when Lila and Elena talk on the phone, Elena never says if they switch back and forth or not.
Elena telephones Nino and speaks to Eleonora (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, chapter 118), who cries that she will smash her face if she calls again. In her mental diatribe against Eleonora, Elena finds herself using insults in dialect (chapter 119). She is beside herself, ready to do worse damage than what Eleonora threatened. She refers to “another” self “buried under a crust of meekness” who mixes dialect and Italian.
I can’t help but think of the screaming fights of the mothers in the street that she witnessed as a girl. Her carefully built, assiduous habits of study, her discipline, her pitiless self-assimilation, splinter under the force of the violence of desire and rebellion that simmered and were repressed for so long.
The episode in Pisa stands out because Lenù decides to use the dialect (and violence), while with Eleonora she feels a rage that she cannot control. Maybe she is vigilant in public situations more than she is in her private life…
I agree, the first place her linguistic boundaries are giving way are in her own private behavior and in her private inhibitions. In “Story of the Lost Child,” Elena repeatedly refers to the breakdown of other boundaries: “Montpellier…gave me the impression that my boundaries had burst and I was expanding…” (26). Meanwhile Lila, who remains in the rione, experiences smarginatura in place, without ever going anywhere. Elena likes that her world is expanding, but is unnerved by the breakdown in her self-imposed linguistic boundaries.
The issue with accents or dialects is to lose them we lose are culture. For some people it’s easy some not. If you think we are ingrained in the sound of speech since we’re infants. Another thing that is not clear is when the girls speak Italian it maybe grammatically correct but who’s to say they don’t have a detectable accent of cadence of speech? https://www.medicaldaily.com/your-accent-here-stay-science-explains-why-it-so-hard-us-change-way-we-speak-291914
Dialect we don’t have so much, but we do have accents. I lost my Baltimore accent a long time ago. My brother and I love to talk in Baltimorese together. Though it’s a self-conscious exercise, it’s a way of remembering where we come from.