The language question

The longstanding “language question” appeared at the very inception of Italian literature. Starting with Dante (in De vulgari eloquentia), numerous writers have examined the issue of the best language for writing poetry and prose. From the fourteenth century until the start of the nineteenth century, the “question” focused only on the literary language, in a literary history labelled “Italian” for the sake of convenience since it actually consisted of various languages and cultures resulting from the country’s political divisions throughout history. In the sixteenth century, Pietro Bembo sought to establish norms for the literary language, indicating canonical models (Petrarch for poetry and Boccaccio for prose) to which non-Tuscan writers were to adhere. For several centuries, the Accademia della Crusca and its Vocabolario helped to spread Bembo’s canon, with the first edition appearing in 1612 (Manzoni, who was a keen book annotator, used the Verona edition of 1806). From the latter part of the eighteenth century, Bembo’s canon was criticized by Enlightenment culture and people began to look to the European languages and appreciate the use of dialect in literature. But it was during the period of Romanticism and the Risorgimento that the language question was definitively released from its previous status as an exclusively literary issue, becoming a major political and cultural issue relating to the language of social communication, above all spoken communication. With the clear and simple prose of the Promessi Sposi (after linguistic revision), Manzoni resolved two issues simultaneously. On the one hand he shaped and spread modern prose for the new “popular” literature envisaged by the romantics, and on the other hand he achieved his own ideal of a language that was viva e vera (alive and true), a unified language spoken by all Italians, the language that as senator of the Kingdom of Italy he described analytically (in some of his unpublished writings on language) and had already prophesized in his civic and patriotic poem Marzo 1821