Italian History

It should come as no surprise that Italian is the Romance language that is most closely related to the root language of Latin. Most historians mark the advent of Italian as a language with Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy in 1321. Dante combined elements of the different Italian dialects into his native Tuscan dialect to create what has come to be accepted as Italian.

The previous strengths of city-states lead to the development of very strong dialectal differences in Italian. Through the last few centuries there has been more of a linguistic unification of the language but strong regional differences persist today. It is not uncommon to here someone say he speaks Italian and X dialect and most people will immediately alter to Italian when speaking to an Italian from a different region or a foreigner.

In the progression of the language towards a uniform Italian there were several significant events. A series of conflicts in the first half of the 16th century labeled “the Italian Wars” that involved a number of alliances and betrayals that would make any soap opera blush in comparison left most of what is now northern Italy under the control or nominal control of the Spanish. Following this the development of Accademia della Crusca in Florence in 1582-3 and the subsequent publication of the first Italian dictionary in 1612 led to increased standardization of the language. When “the Corsican” Napoleon occupied most of northern and central Italy at the very end of the 18th century this allowed more opportunity for standardization. Finally the unification of Italy in 1861 created for the first time in history an actual Italian nation rather than a grouping of principalities, city-states and kingdoms.

There are still many differences between the northern and southern portions of the country, linguistically, culturally and politically, a millenium of habits do not die in a few generations, but the language is slowly becoming more unified. There is a large amount of migration from southern to northern regions and of course the advent of modern communication in Italy as everywhere means more standardization, the whole country watches the same movies and tv programs and reads the same websites.

Italian is spoken by about 120 million people worldwide and is the official language in Italy and San Marino and a co-official language in Switzerland, Croatia, Slovenia and Vatican City. There are large groups of immigrants in South America, the United States, Australia and the UK. Italian is the fifth most taught foreign language in the world and one of the primary languages in the art community. Learning Italian will also enhance your English vocabulary and make it easier to learn any of the other Romance languages.

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