The debate on the Italian language (known as the questione della lingua) dates back as far as the 14th century; but it reached its zenith in the 19th, when it also gained wider cultural-political significance.
The publication of the Vocabolario della Crusca (first published in Venice, in 1612; reprinted in 1623, 1691, and again in 1729-38) established the Florence dialect as the normative standard; henceforth, the issue of language was dominated by discussions either in favour of or against the new vocabulary. In the theoretical debate that followed, numerous Enlightenment scholars criticized the new vocabulary: thus, Melchiorre Cesarotti (1730–1808) in his Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue applicato alla lingua italiana (definitive edition 1800) called for the creation of a national language council, to be established in Florence, to which intellectuals from all the regions would contribute. Cesarotti recommended expanding the technical vocabulary, and was receptive to both dialects and foreign loan words. Such receptiveness dwindled as a result of the Napoleonic campaigns and the French hegemony imposed by him.
The 19th-century questione della lingua was facing the large gap between literary language, written and spoken by few, and the many local languages and dialects, spoken by the vast majority of the population. Many intellectuals saw language as an essential tool in the national unification process, and also as an opportunity to resolve the social problem of widespread illiteracy and poor education. Whatever different language-political positions there were, inspired by different political and ideological alignments, all parties concurred in their preference for a new, practical language over a poetic one, the rejection of Latinate syntax in favour of less rigid syntactic structures, and the need for a modernization of the lexicon to address new intellectual, technical-scientific, and communicative needs.
Different doctrines arose. Purismo (“purism”) was based on the belief that the Italian language had achieved perfection in the Tuscan-Florentine writings of the 14th century, which therefore should be the normative source for the present. Its main advocate, Antonio Cesari (1760–1828), reprinted the Vocabolario della Crusca in 1806-11, enriching it with numerous additions drawn from 14th-century vocabulary. Against this, Cesari’s opponents (known as “Enlightened classicists”) published a Proposta di alcune correzioni ed aggiunte al Vocabolario della Crusca (6 vols, 1817-24). The main coordinator was Vincenzo Monti (1754–1828). Hostile to archaism, and open to lexical innovations drawn from modern intellectual writings, including foreign ones, Monti’s anti-Florentine stance was prevalent in the Lombard milieu, and found scholarly endorsement from Bernardino Biondelli (1804–1886) – for whom Italian was “a general and conventional language” – and Carlo Cattaneo (1801–1869).
Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873) opposed purism as well. Unlike Niccolò Tommaseo and his neotoscanismo naturalistico (“naturalistic neo-Tuscanism”), which considered literary language to be based on the language spoken by the people of Tuscany, Manzoni suggested adopting urban Florentine, as it was spoken by the cultivated classes.
The issue of language would occupy Manzoni throughout his career as a writer. The search for a narrative and dialogic prose determined the complex drafting of his famous historical novel I promessi sposi (started in 1821 and published in its definitive form between 1840 and 1842), undertaken with the stated aim of systematizing Italy’s literary language. After his stay in Florence, in 1827, and following his linguistic enquiry into the subject, Manzoni devoted himself to the linguistic revision of his novel according to Florentine usage. At the same time, he developed a linguistic theory to justify his adoption of the cultivated-Florentine idiom. Manzoni’s purpose was to replace Italian dialectal variety with a single language which would facilitate communication among all the members of the nation. According to him, it was necessary to take a living language and raise it to the rank of a koinè. Much as in France the language of Paris had become the recognized language of the nation, Manzoni suggested, Italy should adopt the idiom of Florence, due to its halcyon literary glory and its natural structural “spontaneity”.
Analysis of the French socio-historical situation led the linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli (1829–1907) to the opposite conclusion. He considered the French analogy inappropriate because of the enormous differences between the historical situations of the two countries. The political division of Italy, the decentralization of its economic life, and the plurality of its cultural centres had prevented Florence from becoming a capital comparable to Paris. Moreover, strict unilingualism represented an obstacle to the free development of the “intellectual industrious vitality” (energia operosa intellettuale) which Ascoli considered essential to Italy. He believed in the benefits of possessing two linguistic tools that could be flexibly and interchangeably used depending on circumstances, and therefore advocated local variants with, in addition, a “supra-regional” language connected to the socio-cultural progress of the nation. Italy already possessed such a language, which had evolved over the centuries from many diverse contributions and reflected the nation’s cultural wealth and diversity; but it was the prerogative of the cultivated classes. Therefore, Ascoli argued, the main problem was how the “scarce density of culture and the excessive concern for form” impeded the widespread currency of a unitary national language, calling, accordingly, for raising the cultural level of society by stimulating its industrious vitality. This modernization would be hindered. he felt, by propagating the popular language of Florence. By stressing the remarkable literary and scientific activities that characterized the north of Italy, and in particular Milan, Ascoli insisted on the need to spread a language that was actually spoken and was in touch with the civic dynamics of society.
Indeed, it had been from Milan, and from a group of Milanese writers around the periodical Il caffé (1764-66), that rebellions against the Florentinism of the Accademia della Crusca had already emanated at an earlier stage. The main 19th-century opponents of neo-Tuscanism and of Manzoni’s Florentinism were Carlo Tenca (1801–1869) and the aforementioned Carlo Cattaneo. They defended the notion of Italian as lingua comune (“common language”) in its constituent and historical elements, as “the result of the superior integration of specific, municipal, and idiomatic experiences in the culture of the nation”. Cattaneo and Tenca also insisted on the importance of dialects (which they considered the custodians of historical continuity) and of dialect literature.
When Florence became the capital of the newly created kingdom of Italy in 1865, the time seemed right for the adoption of Manzoni’s linguistic agenda. Early in 1868, the newly-appointed Minister of Education, Emilio Broglio, set up a commission to determine the easiest way to spread “good language and pronunciation” among all the classes. The commission, which was divided into two sections – a Milanese and a Florentine one – was presided over by Manzoni himself, who was also assigned the task of drawing up the Relazione intorno all’unità della lingua e ai mezzi per diffonderla. The commission’s report was duly published in the Nuova Antologia, and its recommendations were put into effect later that same year when Broglio initiated a Novo vocabolario della lingua italiana secondo l’uso di Firenze. The proposal caused widespread dissent among Italian intellectuals; Ascoli responded with an essay – subsequently published as the Proemio to the newly created periodical Archivio glottologico italiano (1873) – countering Manzoni’s proposals and re-examining the language issue.
The theoretical overcoming of the language issue as intended by Manzoni was enabled by the development, in the second half of the century on the German model, of dialectological and linguistic studies (thanks namely to Biondelli, author of Saggio sui dialetti gallo-italici, 1853, and Ascoli). Historical documentary research established that archaic Florentine constituted the matrix of Manzoni’s proposed standard, “legitimized” as a “national” language by the literary prestige of Dante and other 14th-century illustrious writers, but by that time already enriched by northern influences and Latin borrowings. There was no justification for suppressing a similar dynamics in the present, or for hindering the language’s improvement in the light of cultural, economic, and social progress. As a result, a kind of “linguistic liberalism” spread among the cultivated classes, which were also not bound by any form of blinding “linguistic nationalism”.
In the early 1870s, Romance studies began to take shape. Two periodicals were founded: the Rivista di filologia romanza (1872), directed by Luigi Manzoni, Ernesto Monaci, and Edmund Stengel, and devoted to Romance languages and literature; and Ascoli’s aforementioned Archivio glottologico italiano (1873), which dealt with Italian dialects and counted the foremost Romance scholars among its contributors (such as Napoleone Caix, author of Saggio sulla storia della lingua e dei dialetti d’Italia, 1872). Other philologists who contributed considerably to the development of Romance studies in Italy included Adolfo Mussafia (1835–1905), Ugo Angelo Canello (1848–1883), Pio Rajna (1847–1939), and Francesco D’Ovidio (1849–1925). All these scholars contributed, together with Alessandro D’Ancona (1835–1914) and Domenico Comparetti (1835–1927), to the renewal of historical-philological studies in the second half of the century. Thanks to the introduction of the comparative method in philology, they stressed the importance of the historical perspective in the Italian cultural renewal. Moreover, the “historical school” aimed at providing literary disciplines with a scientific status, as opposed to the purely aesthetic criticism that had characterized them until then.
In the aftermath of the unification, a keen interest in Indo-European languages also arose, attested to both by the translation of numerous foreign works and the publication of syllabi and didactic manuals. The Rivista di filologia e istruzione classica (1872), albeit devoted to the Greek and Latin studies, left enough space for Indo-European studies, Romance as well as Celtic glottology, and general linguistics. The blossoming of glottological interests took place even to the detriment of classical philology: indeed, whereas the latter had remained somewhat entrenched, Oriental languages studies and comparative linguistics developed rapidly. Indo-European studies took hold principally in Piedmont.
