When did Italian become a language shared by all?

17 Luca Serianni

When did Italian become a language shared by all?

€ 3.00

Sunday 25 May 2014 10:30 am

piazza del Duomo 1

There are two ongoing, contradictory and false convictions about the Italian language. The first is that, in the wake of the patriotism fuelled by the Risorgimento and the country’s subsequent unification, the wealth and variety of Italy’s dialectal heritage and the use of dialects in daily communication have been lost. The second is that Italian became the language used by just a very limited elite of literati. However, research in the last 20 years has unearthed evidence that radically changes this picture. Luca Serianni, one of Italy’s preeminent linguists and philologists, offers us a fascinating historical analysis of what it means for a people to share a language and the path that led to this linguistic sharing: the evolution of Italian from a language of diplomatic correspondence, to the massive amounts of popular (and especially epistolary) writing that was produced, and ultimately to a shared language, or at least one understood by the illiterate masses, in particular through the work of the Catholic Church.

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Luca Serianni is Professor of History of the Italian Language at Rome’s University ‘La Sapienza’. He is a member of the Accademia dei Lincei and the Accademia della Crusca. He holds an honorary PhD from the University of Valladolid, Spain. He is the editor of two journals, Studi linguistici italiani and Studi di lessicografia italiana. He is the vice president of the Società Dante Alighieri. In 1988 he published a widely acclaimed Grammar of the Italian Language that obtained many subsequent editions, he studies a variety of aspects of the Italian language, not only literary, since its origins to the present. Together with M. Trifone he is editing the new edition of the Devoto-Oli Italian vocabulary. His latest books are: Italiani scritti (il Mulino, 2007); La lingua poetica italiana. Grammatica e testi (2009), Scritti sui banchi. L'italiano a scuola tra alunni e insegnanti (with G. Benedetti, 2009) by Carocci; Italiano in prosa (Franco Cesati, 2012); Prima lezione di grammatica (2006), L'ora d'italiano (2010), Leggere, scrivere, argomentare. Prove ragionate di scrittura (2013) by Laterza.

Luca Serianni & i Dialoghi