A unified language                               

In January 1868, Education Minister Emilio Broglio set up a committee to prepare proposals that would help to spread the use of good Italian with suitable pronunciation, appointing Manzoni as President. Since 1851, he had exchanged ideas with Manzoni on Italy’s language question. The committee was divided into two sections, a Milanese section that included Manzoni, Ruggero Bonghi and Giulio Carcano, and a Florentine section with Raffaello Lambruschini, Niccolò Tommaseo, Giuseppe Bertoldi, Achille Mauri and Gino Capponi. Manzoni drafted his proposals in a matter of days, and had the approval of the other two members of his subcommittee. His report was duly sent to Broglio, and published first in the Nuova Antologia and later in Perseveranza under the title Dell’unità della lingua e dei mezzi di diffonderla. The Florentine section also published its report, which clashed somewhat with Manzoni’s ideas since its authors believed that contemporary educated Florentine spoken usage was not enough to form good Italian, but recourse to good writers was also necessary. Manzoni resigned as president of the committee, which was dissolved by the Minister, and wrote a reply in the form of an Appendice to his report. Nonetheless, Manzoni’s proposal of promoting the spoken Italian of the Florentine middle class as the unified language of Italy was adopted. Broglio created a board, of which he was president, with Giorgini (Manzoni’s son-in-law), Fanfani and other lexicographers, to compile the Novo vocabolario della lingua italiana secondo l’uso di Firenze, which was published between 1873 and 1897. The unified language was spread also thanks to the many regional dictionaries that enabled users to translate from dialects into Italian, and by school policies that favoured the new unified language over the local spoken varieties (a measure that was considered extreme by some linguists, including Ascoli).