Talk:Italian language

Early forms

The early forms Tuscan and Florentine directs to the modern dialects of Italian, although is likely that the Tuscan and Florentine variety was a previous form of the modern one. Wouldn't that be a mistake? Francesco Miracapillo (talk) 23:01, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Can you flesh out the question to clarify what it is you're asking? An historically earlier form of either was obviously a previous form of the modern form of either. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 00:07, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

Yes but the one that is referring to, in the page, is the modern form of those. For instance, if you click on the "Florentine" link it will take you back to the page of the modern Florentine dialect, instead what it refers to is probably the Florentine of 1300, which for sure was pretty different. I was wondering if it wasn't better to either remove the link, or find another solution. Francesco Miracapillo (talk) 22:41, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

Seems to me the solution is to improve the article on Florentine -- assuming it should exist in the first place, rather than as a sub-category within Tuscan. As it stands, the article labeled Florentine contains very little that's unique to Florence, the reason for the existence of the list under Examples is unexplained (mostly to illustrate subject clitics and use of ci with avere, neither of which is solely Florentine?), and there is no history. One reference is uninformed dilettantism containing outright falsehoods. The two serious references are good, but they seem to have been mostly ignored, and more are needed, most obviously, among other sources, Neri Binazzi's work. Bref, the problem isn't the link to Florentine, but the contents of the Florentine article. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 14:18, 15 August 2022 (UTC)

OR Map removed

I just removed a newly created map, for the following reasons:

• The map has no sources supporting it;
• In the map there are macroscopic errors. Among them:
  • In Corsica and Nice nowadays there is no native Italian speaking minority anymore;
  • In Central Italy, Italian has been traditionally spoken by minorities only in Tuscany (Florence, Siena) and Rome;

If someone wants to restore the map, please before doing that bring sources which support it (at best on Common). Thanks, Alex2006 (talk) 10:53, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

Not sure how to change it, also Toronto is labeled where Detriot is Reddogisguilty (talk) 23:13, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Change "human body" in the sentence on humanism?

Perhaps "human mind and body" or something like that instead?

Original: "During this time, long-existing beliefs stemming from the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church began to be understood from new perspectives as humanists—individuals who placed emphasis on the human body and its full potential—began to shift focus from the church to human beings themselves." 205.178.63.9 (talk) 23:38, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

"Dante is still credited with standardizing the Italian language."

Really? At best, "credited with standardizing" makes this a point rather severely stretched, requiring a highly reputable scholarly source or two upon whom to heap blame for the misstatement. Better would be for whoever wrote this bit of text to tweak it so as to represent historical reality and thus not misinform readers who are not steeped in the subject matter. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 20:07, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

Absolutely agree. It's just a misleading statement. Certainly Dante popularized the Tuscan dialect, but my understanding is that with respect to the codification of it as a standard language for literary purposes, Bembo drew more on Boccaccio and Petrarch, rather than Dante. I might have some time tomorrow to go looking for reliable sources. Wobblygriswold (talk) 20:21, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

Sounds good, thanks. Yes, misleading at best, since Dante actually didn't really do much, if anything, that could be construable as standardizing, including DVE. (I keep thinking that Alinei's work chasing down the first instances of the label italiano could be of help on this, but I can't for the life of me remember where/when it was published.) Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 19:02, 12 January 2025 (UTC)

Tuscan dialect

@Barefoot through the chollas, Could you explain how Tuscan isn't a dialect? The Tuscan dialect article starts with the line - "Tuscan (Italian: dialetto toscano [djaˈlɛtto tosˈkaːno; di.a-]; locally: vernacolo) is a set of Italo-Dalmatian varieties of Romance spoken in Tuscany, Corsica, and Sardinia." This article mentions, "The official Italian language recognized by the Italian states and later by the Kingdom of Italy was born of the dialect which is now mainly spoken only in Tuscany. Other regions of Italy have their own lexicon and have strayed from the Tuscan style of speaking. However, any native Tuscan will tell you with great pride that they speak the “true” Italian language." That means Tuscan is a dialect on which Standard Italian is based, and the dialect is still extant.CharlesWain (talk) 12:50, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

@CharlesWain, yours is a good question. Not easy to answer relatively briefly. What I said was this: "Tuscan of centuries ago is the base of Italian, but not a dialect of Italian." (emphasis added)

Misunderstanding can and does arise from two usages of the term dialect. In the anglophone world especially, but not only, the conceptualization tends to be dialect of a large language, e.g. "The traditional speech of working-class Boston is a dialect of English," meaning a variety of (hold that thought) English.

In the Italian context, dialetto is normally taken to mean "local indigenous language", and in most cases the reference is to a minor (in terms of number of speakers and geographic reach) Romance language developed naturally from the colloquial Latin at the time of and subsequent to Roman occupation, i.e. long ago, indeed. Venetian, Bolognese [...], Consentino [...] are all dialetti native to Italy, thus dialetti italiani -- easily expressed in English as Italian dialects, though perhaps unwisely due to possible conflation with the anglophone dialect of presumption.

In terms of relationship, those are "sister" languages to all other Romance languages minor and major, but not derived from or varieties of or beholden in any way to any of the others. Tuscan -- which is quite variegated within its local boundaries -- was and is one of those sister languages (none of which can have possibly "strayed from the Tuscan style of speaking" any more than Venetians have strayed from the Bolognese or Cosentino style of speaking).

Centered on Florentine, Tuscan did, however, "get lucky' by eventually being selected as the basis for engineering a pan-Italy standard. But at no time from Dante on (nor before) has the (varying and mutable) written form (nor present-day spoken) been identical to any variety of Tuscan, Florentine included. At present, certainly for Tuscan folks "of a certain age", the poles of dialetto/italiano are pretty clear, the contrasts of the two sometimes striking, and there's no problem at all recognizing if a person is speaking genuine Tuscan or Standard Italian. ("any native Tuscan will tell you with great pride that they speak the “true” Italian language" is false due to the any; some Tuscans will half-jokingly say such things. Some may make the claim seriously, but not just any, and I don't recall ever hearing anyone do so.)

In sum, Tuscan is an Italian dialect, yes, geographically and typologically, along with innumerable other dialects (longstanding local languages) native to Italy. But it is not now and never has been a dialect of (i.e. a variety of) Italian.

Final thought: I suppose one could flip the relation on its head and attempt to mount an argument that by dint of being in its origins and at its core a sort of polished-and-cultivated spin-off of (mainly) Florentine, Italian is in an historical sense a dialect of Tuscan. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 22:32, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

@Barefoot through the chollas, I am not able to comprehend the difference between "Italian dialect" and "dialect of Italian". Is present variety in usage in Tuscany considered a distinct language by linguists? could you quote from a source or cite a WP:RS? Thanks. CharlesWain (talk) 16:58, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

I don't know that I can explain it any better, but try this: go back in time to the year 1000 in Italy, long before Italy as a single nation existed, thus well prior to attempts to establish a national Italian language, a time when the average person was illiterate, rarely ventured far from home, and had little or no contact with outsiders from far away.

What language did those average persons speak? The local language of their very immediate area, a natural evolution of the colloquial Latin "planted" there centuries before. In Tuscany, for example, Florentines spoke Florentine, Prato natives spoke Pratese, etc. etc. Those two would have been mutually comprehensible due to close distance, yet distinct in ways quite noticeable to native speakers and detectable to attentive outsiders (which they still are today, though more subtly now than in times past).

Those fond of the term might call them dialects: dialect of Florence, dialect of Prato (of Lucca, of Pisa, etc. etc.). Fair enough, dialect thus meaning something like "local speech type". Are they dialects of some larger language, varieties derived from or constituting manifestations of some larger language? No. If the expression dialect of must be used, the most that can be said is that they're Romance dialects of [Italy, Central Italy, Tuscany... take your pick; extend the list throughout the Romance area of Europe if you wish, labeling appropriately]. If that's morphed to dialects of Romance, there's no identifiable language in the year 1000 to be dialects of. Romance in that sense simply means (by circumstance circularly in that no single source language identifiable as Romance exists) something like "local speech types evolved from colloquial Latin".

If you grasp that, you're on your way. For WP:RS, there's a large bibliography in the Languages of Italy Wikipedia article. First, though, absorb the Language or dialect section of the article. Then, from the bibliography, Cravens 2014, though not aimed specifically at the question you ask, might be a helpful step. Loporcaro 2009 makes things very clear, and Marcato 2007 should be very helpful, too. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 19:28, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

I think what Barefoot *may* be saying is this: Standard Italian is based on a certain tongue, no longer spoken, that we could call Historical Florentine. Historical Florentine is no longer spoken, so is not a dialect of modern Standard Italian. However, the descendants of Historical Florentine include not only Standard Italian, but a modern, currently-spoken dialect called Florentine (Modern Florentine, if you like). Is that a fair summary? Wobblygriswold (talk) Wobblygriswold (talk) 05:36, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

@Wobblygriswold, thanks for clarifying with a helpful complementary perspective. One can always pick nits, of course (alas), but I think the one most relevant to @User:CharlesWain's question might be describable as the directionality of the relationship Florentine (or Central Tuscan) ↔ Italian. That is, even if Florentine hadn't changed much in the past few hundred years (and we don't really know how much it has), if dialect of is used in the sense necessarily implying something like 'derived from', Italian would be in its origins a dialect of Florentine, rather than the other way around. Come to think of it... regardless of the degree of change in Florentine over time, Italian is, historically, derivative of Florentine. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 20:27, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

"Italian is an official language in [...] Corsica"

According to the article on Corsica, "Italian was the official language of Corsica until 9 May 1859, when it was replaced by French." The claim that it is official now needs a reputable source. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 00:24, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

"...three types of adjectives: descriptive, invariable and form-changing"

This conflates various issues and levels. camicia/camion verde: verde is both descriptive (semantic function) and invariable (unmarked for gender) yet variable by number: marked for plural (morphology) in verdi. begli svedesi/svedesi belli are marked m. pl. (morphology), with distinct phonological forms determined by the phonetic structure (phonology) of the item immediately following. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 00:29, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

"Noun objects normally come after the verb, as do pronoun objects after imperative verbs, infinitives and gerunds, but otherwise, pronoun objects come before the verb."

Ho conosciuto lei anni fa, ma non conosco lui. Capisco te, ma non capisco loro. Pronoun object follows verb. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 15:58, 29 March 2025 (UTC)