Italian History

Italian Lnaguage is a beautiful subject. Every year half a million students attend Italian language courses outside Italy, in every country throughout the world. Why? Italian is a language of culture. Speaking Italian means having access not only to an extremely valuable literary heritage, essential to the history of Europe and to extremely precious humanistic and scientific texts, but also to Italian theatre, music, opera, cinema and television. What is the History of this fashinating language? The history of the Italian language is quite complex but the modern standard of the language was largely shaped by relatively recent events. The earliest surviving texts which can definitely be called Italian (as opposed to its predecessor Vulgar Latin).During the 14th century the Tuscan dialect began to predominate, because of the central position of Tuscany in Italy, and because of the aggressive commerce of its most important city, Florence. In fact, Florentine culture produced the three literary artists who best summarized Italian thought and feeling of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance: Petrarca, Boccaccio and, specially, Dante Alighieri. Dante was the one who mixed southern Italian languages, especially Sicilian, with his native Tuscan ("supposed" to be derived from Etruscan and Oscan) in his epic poems known collectively as the Commedia, to which Giovanni Boccaccio later affixed the title Divina. Therefore, the language of Italian literature is modeled on that spoken in Florence in the 15th century. In fact, the first edition of an official Italian vocabulary, published in 1612 by the Accademia della Crusca, was built on the basis of the following Florentine works: "Divina Commedia" by Dante, "Decameron" by Bocaccio and "Canzionere" by Petrarca. Today, Toscano is still considered the "cleanest" of all Italian dialects as it is the most similar to the original or classical Latin. It was not until the 19th century that the language spoken by educated Tuscans spread to become the language of a new nation. The unification of Italy in 1861 had a profound impact not only on the political scene but also resulted in a significant social, economical, and cultural transformation. With mandatory schooling, the literacy rate increased, and many speakers abandoned their native dialect in favor of the national language.