Tuscan, Florentine, and Italian. External history

This chapter traces the gradual expansion of medieval Italian dialects and especially Florentine first as the basis of the literary language of Italy and then as a standard model. The main causes and the essential stages of this process are described. Among the causes are the fact that Tuscan dialects are less distant from Latin, their intermediate position between northern and southern dialects, the socio-economic development of Tuscany between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and, above all, the literary prestige of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The major stages are the publication in 1525 of Pietro Bembo’s Prose, the first printing of the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca in 1612, the definitive edition of Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (1840–1842) and, lastly, the Unification of Italy (1861). Despite the linguistic success of Florence, which only began to wane during the twentieth century, ‘Florentine’ did not gain acceptance as the name of the language, because the name ‘Italian’, initially used as an anti-Tuscan term, became the established name of the language at least as early as the eighteenth century.