History Of The Italian Language

The Italian language stems directly from Latin, just like other Romance languages like Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, French, Romanian and other minority languages (Occitan, Proven al, Galician, Ladin and Friulan).

The Italian language has developed through a long and gradual process, which began after the Fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century.

Up until this moment, Latin had spread and had been imposed across the Empire as the madre franca , or the shared language.

After the fall of the Empire, vernacular and local forms of the language had an important role in society and the everyday life of the population.

However, for several centuries, and especially during the Middle Ages, Latin was the dominant cultural language, used throughout European Universities and in all the official acts and procedures of the Church.

From a historical perspective, it is not wrong to claim that the high, or cultured, Tuscan dialect, which the three most important poets of the 1300s (Alighieri, Boccaccio and Petrarch) wrote in can be considered the basis of modern Italian.

Yet despite this, the Italian language as we know it today is the result of a long process of evolution and debates, which began in the 1600s, over what the correct form of the language should be. At the end, the question of what Italian to speak remained. Even though at the end of the 1900s many writers and cultural figures were being inspired by the Tuscan model, in every aspect of the language, there are several relevant historical and social factors that need to be considered.

Firstly, for centuries up until the unification of Italy in 1861, the country was divided into a number of different states, which were usually under foreign rule. When Italy was united in 1861 the decision was taken to make Tuscan the official language of the country.

Within the Italian population, however, there was and always had been high rates of illiteracy, and this illiteracy continued predominantly in rural regions until the 1950s.

As a result, dialects were used as the everyday language for centuries, and anyone who was able to express themselves and communicate in Italian did so using grammatical, lexical and phonetical aspects influenced by regional and local dialects.

The use of dialects in Italy represents a unique situation compared to the rest of Europe. Even today in many different parts of Italy dialects are used as an informal way of communicating in different social settings and within families.

It is also worth remembering that dialects, as well as accents, can change a lot even within the same region.