Storia della lingua italiana

by JLS

The Italian language has a long history, but the modern standard of the language was largely shaped by relatively recent events.

The earliest surviving texts that can definitely be called "Italian" (or more accurately, "vernacular", as distinct from its predecessor Vulgar Latin) are legal formulae from the region of Benevento that date from 960–963.

What would come to be thought of as Italian was first formalized in the early fourteenth century through the works of Dante Alighieri, who mixed southern Italian languages, especially Sicilian, with his native Florentine in his epic poems known collectively as the Commedia, to which Giovanni Boccaccio later affixed the title Divina.

Dante's works were read throughout Italy and his written dialect became the "canonical standard" that all educated Italians could understand.

Dante is still credited with standardizing the Italian language and, thus, the dialect of Florence became the basis for what would become the official language of Italy.

Italian often was an official language of the various Italian states predating unification, slowly usurping Latin, even when ruled by foreign powers (such as the Spanish in the Kingdom of Naples, or the Austrians in the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia), even though the masses spoke primarily vernacular languages and dialects.

Italian was also one of the many recognised languages in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Italy has always had a distinctive dialect for each city, since the cities, until recently, were thought of as city-states.

Those dialects now have considerable variety.

As Tuscan-derived Italian came to be used throughout Italy, features of local speech were naturally adopted, producing various versions of Regional Italian.

The most characteristic differences, for instance, between

"Roman"

and

"Milanese"

are the gemination of initial consonants and the pronunciation of stressed "e", and of "s" in some cases: e.g.

"va bene" "all right": is pronounced

va ˈbːɛne

by a Roman (and by any standard-speaker, like a Florentine),

va ˈbene

by a Milanese (and by any speaker whose native dialect lies to the north of La Spezia-Rimini Line).

"a casa "at home" is

a ˈkːasa

for Roman and standard,

a ˈkaza

for Milanese and generally northern -- including "Ligurian".

In contrast to the Northern Italian language, southern Italian dialects and languages were largely untouched by the Franco-Occitan influences introduced to Italy, mainly by bards from France, during the Middle Ages but, after the Norman conquest of southern Italy, Sicily became the first Italian land to adopt Occitan lyric moods (and words) in poetry.

Even in the case of Northern Italian language, however, scholars are careful not to overstate the effects of outsiders on the natural indigenous developments of the languages.

The economic might and relatively advanced development of Toscana at the time (Late Middle Ages) gave its dialect weight, though the Venetian language remained widespread in medieval Italian commercial life, and Ligurian (or Genoese) remained in use in maritime trade alongside the Mediterranean.

The increasing political and cultural relevance of Florence during the periods of the rise of Medici's bank, Humanism, and the Renaissance made its dialect, or rather a refined version of it, a standard in the arts.

Starting with the Renaissance Italian became the language used in the courts of every state in the peninsula.

The rediscovery of Dante's

"De vulgari eloquentia"

and a renewed interest in linguistics in the sixteenth century, sparked a debate that raged throughout Italy concerning the criteria that should govern the establishment of a modern Italian literary and spoken language.

Scholars divided into three factions:

1) The purists, headed by Venetian

Pietro Bembo

(who, in his

"Gli Asolani", claimed the language might be based only on the great literary classics, such as Petrarca and some part of Boccaccio).

The purists thought the "Divina Commedia" not dignified enough, because it used elements from non-lyric registers of the language.

2) Niccolò Machiavelli and other Florentines preferred the version spoken by ordinary people in their own times.

3) The courtiers, like Baldassare Castiglione and Gian Giorgio Trissino, insisted that each local vernacular contribute to the new standard.

4) A fourth faction claimed the best Italian was the one that the papal court adopted, which was a mix of Florentine and the dialect of Rome.

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Eventually, Bembo's ideas prevailed, and led to publication of the first Italian dictionary in 1612 and the foundation of the

Accademia della Crusca

in Florence (1582–1583), the official legislative body of the Italian language.

An important event that helped the diffusion of Italian was the conquest and occupation of Italy by Napoleon in the early nineteenth century (who was himself of Italian-Corsican descent).

This conquest propelled the unification of Italy some decades after, and pushed the Italian language into a lingua franca used not only among clerks, nobility and functionaries in the Italian courts but also in the bourgeoisie.

Italian literature's first modern novel,

"I Promessi Sposi" (The Betrothed), by Alessandro Manzoni further defined the standard by "rinsing" his Milanese "in the waters of the Arno" (Florence's river), as he states in the Preface to his 1840 edition.

After unification a huge number of civil servants and soldiers recruited from all over the country introduced many more words and idioms from their home languages ("ciao" is Venetian, "panettone" is in the Milanese dialect of the Lombard language etc.).

Only 2.5% of Italy’s population could speak the standard dialect when the nation unified in 1861.