The Italian Language

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The Development of the Italian Language

During the long period of evolution of the Italian language, a number of dialects made their appearance. The quantity of these and their individual claims upon their speakers as being the proper speech presented some difficulty in the establishment of an accepted form of the language that could reflect the cultural unity of the peninsula. The earliest documents, produced in the X century, are dialectal in language and during the following three centuries writers used their own dialects, producing a number of schools of literature.

This gradual development of the spoken language led it to be more and more different from the Latin used by the church and the governments in their official documents, which meant that in the end there was no formal language which could be used officially and yet be understood with ease by the average person. Eventually this led to a desire no ennoble everyday speech and in Italy, starting from the XIII century, writers began using the everyday language, enriched with borrowings from Classical Latin, though by no means abandoning the latter.

Perhaps the first written instance of what we can call “Italian” dates from 960, when the Oaths of Capua were written in the vernacular.