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The Rise of Romance Languages and the Formation of Italian Dialects

When the Roman Empire fell (476 A.D.), it was replaced by new Roman-Barbarian kingdoms and Classical and spoken Latin were permanently divided. The former remained unchanged, used only in texts or by an educated elite whilst the spoken form was used by millions of people in their daily lives and thus came into contact with the languages of the Germanic invaders and was developed into different tongues. In this way were born the Romance languages. In Italy, the use of Latin as the single language gradually faded to be replaced by numerous dialects: the "vernacular" which varied from region to region.

The First appearances of the Vernacular in Literature

The vernacular first appears in literature in the poetry of the 13th century with the Sicilian, Tuscan and "Stil novo" poets who employed a refined lexicon. The shift to the use of the vernacular made possible a set of specific rules and forms thereby removed from the vicissitudes of the spoken language. At the same time it became possible to refine linguistic expression by toning down the rougher local dialects. Later, the great Tuscan writers of the 13th and 14th centuries, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, made a fundamental contribution by writing a literary language that would be the model for succeeding centuries.

The Confirmation of the Florentine Dialect

The linguistic unification of Italy came about gradually through the spread of a language that developed from the Tuscan dialect, more precisely Florentine. It became a superior language, used in politics, administration and inter-regional communications; fields hitherto reserved for Latin which survived, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries, as the language of culture and the Church. After an initial period in which the various dialects vied for supremacy, Florence's prodigious economic growth, social development and commercial and cultural expansion, led to the adoption over the centuries of its dialect as the common Italian tongue.

The "Language Problem" between the 16th and 20th Centuries

The Florentine vernacular that was to become the Italian tongue was for a long time used outside Tuscany only as a literary language, encouraged by men of letters such as Pietro Bembo and the Academicians of Crusca, and the majority of people used their regional dialect. Italian also underwent a slow lexical and syntactical improvement, due in part to the principal writers of the 19th century: Foscolo, Leopardi, and above all, Manzoni. Only from the 18th century and particularly after Unification (1861) was a knowledge of Italian established and the time-honored dialect division of the country healed.

Linguistic Minorities in Northern Italy

The majority of Italians now speak Italian and regional dialects are used less and less. Nonetheless, there are two bilingual regions (Aosta Valley and Trentino Alto Adige) as well as some linguistic minorities. Ladin, one of the dialects derived from Latin, is spoken in the Dolomite valleys and principally, in the Friuli region (around 900,000 inhabitants) where there is a lively use of the regional tongue alongside Italian. In Piedmont, particularly in the provinces of Cuneo and Turin, many people continue to speak Occitan, a Provencal-type dialect similar to that spoken in southern France. Slovene linguistic groups can be found in some valleys in the province of Udine and more so in the provinces of Gorizia and Trieste.

Linguistic Minorities in Southern Italy and the Islands

During the late Middle Ages Slavs settled in the Marches, on the Salento peninsula and in Molise where even today there is a minority of Croatian speakers. Other migrations, like that of the Albanians who fled the Turkish invasion of the 15th century, led to the establishment of "Tosca": a variety of Albanian that continues to be the native tongue for many of the inhabitants of Molise and Calabria. There are Greek-speaking groups in the provinces of Lecce (Apulia) and Reggio Calabria which date back to the ancient Greek colonies. Finally, a good half of the population of Alghero in Sardinia speaks Catalan -- a legacy of the Aragonese invasion in 14th century.

Bilingualism in the Regions with a Special Statute

There are two bilingual regions in Italy: that is, where the use of Italian is on a par with either French, as in the Aosta Valley, or German, as in Trentino Alto Adige. In the Aosta Valley and in some valleys to the north-west of Turin, the traditional language of the local population is French-Provencal. The special statute of 1948 allowed for the parity of French and Italian in public documents, in schools and in civil life. The German-speaking minority in Italy inhabits a large area of Trentino Alto Adige where both Italian and German are recognized as the official language.

The Origins of an Italian Literature

The rise of a literature, both written and spoken, in the vernacular began in the 13th century; a period of great political and civil revival in the Italian cities and a lively renaissance in art and culture after the difficult centuries following barbarian domination. There were a geat number of trends in 13th-century literature: religious poetry (which thrived in Umbria partly as a result of the activity of Saint Francis, especially with the work of Jacopone da Todi); poetry made popular by the French jongleurs; the comic-satirical poetry of Cecco Angiolieri; chivalric literature (the chansons de geste derived from the French); didactic and moralistic prose in which Brunetto Latini was prominent, and, the most widespread, love poetry.

The Sicilian and Tuscan Poets

The first Italian poetry written with literary pretensions emerged, and flourished in Sicily at the Court of the Emperor Frederick II, starting from around 1220 and inspired by the Provencal love lyrics. The poets of the Sicilian school (Guido delle Colonne, Pier dela Vigna, Cielo Dalcamo) treated their single theme of love according to the courtly model. In this way a poetic tradition was begun in which the vernacular Italian was increasingly cleansed of dialectical excess. Later this trend spread to central Italy, especially Tuscany where the poets (Chiaro Davanzati, Compiuta Donzella) expanded and enriched the Sicilian lyric by confronting moral and political themes which reflected the ideals of Communal life.