Italian Dialects - Origin of Italian Dialects

Origin of Italian Dialects

Many Italian regions already had different substrata before the conquest of Italy by the Romans: Northern Italy had a Celtic substratum (this part of Italy was known as Gallia Cisalpina, "Gallia on this side of the Alps"), a Ligurian substratum, or a Venetic substratum. Central Italy had an Etruscan substratum, and Southern Italy had an Italic or Greek substratum. These began as a diversification between the ways of speaking Latin, the official language of the Roman Empire.

Due to the Italian Peninsula's history of fragmentation and colonization by foreign powers (especially France, Spain and Austria-Hungary) between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and unification in 1861, there was considerable linguistic diversification.

The vulgar (i.e., spoken) language of Florence gained prestige in the 14th century after Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) and Giovanni Boccaccio wrote major works in it: the Divina Commedia, the Canzoniere and the Decameron. It was up to Pietro Bembo, a Venitian, to identify Florentine as the language for all of Italy in the Prose della volgar lingua, where he set Petrarch up as the perfect model. Italian, however, was a literary language, hence a written rather than spoken one, except in Tuscany. It soon developed into a different tongue from vernacular Tuscan, a language actually spoken by the populace.

In the parts of Italy that were colonized, official business was often conducted in the colonial power's language, i.e. in French, German or Spanish.

The synthesis of a unified Italian language was the main goal of Alessandro Manzoni, who advocated building a national language derived mainly from Florence's vernacular. Italian was then an unwieldy means for expressing thought. Having lived in Paris a long time, Manzoni had noticed that French, on the contrary, was a very lively language, spoken by ordinary people in the city's streets. The only Italian city where ordinary people spoke something pretty much like literary Italian was Florence, so Italians, in Manzoni's opinion, should take Florentine usage as the basis for a renewal of the national language.

Italian as a spoken language originated in two "linguistic labs", i.e. the metropolitan areas of Milan and Rome, which functioned as magnets for immigrants from the rest of Italy. Immigrants had no other means but the national language to communicate with the locals and other immigrants. After Italy's unification, Italian was also taught in primary schools and its use by ordinary people developed along with mass literacy.

Various regional languages remained the normal means of expression of the populace until the 1950s, when, with breakthroughs in literacy and the emergence of national television programs, Italian became more and more widespread, usually in its regional varieties (Italian dialects).