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The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘Italian’ as: ‘Of or pertaining to Italy or its people; native to or produced in Italy’ and ‘As the designation of the modern language of Italy [. . .] Hence of words, etc.: Belonging to this language. Of books, etc.: Composed or written in this language’. It also states that, as a noun, ‘Italian’ can mean ‘A native of Italy’ or ‘The Italian language’. There is, then, a geographical sense of the word ‘Italian’, denoting something pertaining to the territory of Italy, and a linguistic one designating a particular language. The Oxford English Dictionary does not further define ‘the Italian language’ and in any case one might feel that it needs no definition. After all, there unquestionably is a thing called ‘the Italian language’ (la lingua italiana). This is demonstrated by the fact that it is today the official language of the Republic of Italy and the Republic of San Marino, the sole official language in the Swiss canton of Ticino and one of the official languages (with German and Romansh) of the canton of Grigioni. It is shown by the fact that ‘Italian’ is a subject taught in schools and universities and that the language is abundantly described, and prescribed, in grammars and dictionaries all of which (at least today) substantially concur on what is (and is not) ‘Italian’. The problem is that the geographical and linguistic senses are different, and that the further back one goes in time, the less ‘Italian’ in the geographical sense what we now identify as the Italian language becomes. This language is ‘Italian’, indeed, in the sense that it originates somewhere in Italy, but that ‘somewhere’ is just one region, namely Tuscany, and indeed one town within that region, namely Florence. A twenty-first-century visitor to Italy will not notice much of a problem. If she asks Italians, anywhere from the Alps to Sicily, Parlate italiano? ‘Do you speak Italian?’, she can be pretty confident that the question will be perfectly well understood and she can be almost equally certain that the answer will be Sì ‘Yes’, even if her interlocutors may qualify it surprisingly often by saying that they speak it imperfectly. Yet if she were somehow able to travel back a thousand years, the same question might well be met with puzzlement and indeed incomprehension. It is a fair bet that the word italiano did not even exist in the vernacular speech of the people of Italy at the time. In fact, it shows a classic characteristic of what are nowadays called parole dotte or ‘learnèd words’ (see §8.5)—that is, words, usually taken from classical Latin or Greek, that have been deliberately introduced into the language by intellectuals, mainly from the Renaissance onwards, and which have consequently failed to undergo the sound changes characteristic of continuous transmission from generation to generation of speakers. We would expect not italiano [itaˈljaːno] (and Italia [iˈtaːlja]) but something like **itagliano [itaˈʎːaːno] (and **Itaglia [iˈtaʎːa]), just as Lat. 􀊈􀊋􀊎􀊋􀊃(􀊏) ‘daughter’ gives figlia [ˈfiʎːa]. Yet the fundamental problem would not have been one of pronunciation but of recognition of a concept. Italia existed as a geographical notion (although its definition vacillates over time: cf. Muljačić 1988:289), but not as a 1 2 unified geographical area characterized by a common, distinctive language. In short, there was as yet no such thing as ‘Italian’. Since the end of the Roman Empire, the Italian peninsula, in addition to its obvious geographical divisions, had been fragmented politically, culturally, and above all linguistically. In fact, in the absence for the best part of two millennia of any centripetal Italian government or cultural institutions, the conditions were perfect for the emergence, persistence, and divergence of local linguistic variation. The Latin once spoken not only across Italy but across the Empire had dissolved into numerous, locally different Romance vernaculars, or ‘dialects’. Over small distances these were usually very similar and mutually intelligible, but over greater ones they could be profoundly different in lexicon, phonology, morphology, and syntax. The difference between geographically very distant Italian dialects (say Venetian and Neapolitan) is equal to or greater than that between, say, the modern Spanish language and the modern Italian language, and tales of incomprehension in modern times between speakers of more remotely distant Italian dialects abound (see, e.g., Pellegrini 1970b:222f.; Lepschy 1990:63). The term ‘Italian dialects’ is itself at bottom a geographical expression: it simply denotes the Romance vernaculars of Italy (conventionally excluding Friulian and Ladin in the north-east, and Sardinian in Sardinia), but the label notoriously belies a lack of distinctive, unifying characteristics. Some distinctive linguistic properties of the Italian dialects are not common to all of them while others may be shared by other Romance varieties spoken outside Italy and are therefore not distinctive of Italian dialects (see further §1.4.1). South of a line which roughly follows the Apennines between Carrara in the west and Fano in the east (conventionally known as the ‘La Spezia-Rimini Line’: von Wartburg 1950), and therefore includes Tuscany, there is a degree of distinctive linguistic unity, such as the existence of an opposition between short and long consonants: see further Savoia (1997), and for detailed descriptions of the major Italian dialect areas, Benincà, Parry, and Pescarini (2016); Ledgeway (2016a; 2016c); and Loporcaro and Paciaroni (2016). From the perspective of grammatical and phonological structure, there is really no distinction between ‘a dialect’ and ‘a language’. What is normally meant by ‘a dialect’ in Romance linguistics is the characteristic speech of the natives of a particular locality, as contrasted with that of the natives of other localities, in the circumstances where all these varieties are ‘cognate’ (in our case, all descended from a common linguistic ancestor, namely Latin). The term ‘language’ is usually applied to those Romance dialects which, for various historical reasons, have come to be recognized as having political and/or cultural prestige, are treated as superordinate, within some territory (often a nation-state), to other related speech varieties, constitute models for those seeking to speak or write ‘correctly’, and, usually, are set down in prescriptive grammars and dictionaries (see further Andreose and Renzi 2013:302–307; Pountain 2016). Paradoxical as it may at first sound, the Italian language is itself, historically, an Italian dialect. This statement certainly needs qualification, but there is a fundamental sense in which it is true. The core of the grammatical and phonological system, and the lexicon, of the modern Italian language is a dialect of Tuscany, and more specifically of Florence. Equally paradoxically, the things that are called ‘Italian dialects’ are not dialects ‘of Italian’ in the strictly linguistic sense. They are ‘Italian’ in so far as they are ‘of Italy’, but their relation to Florentine, from which the Italian language has emerged, is that they are its ‘sisters’. Moreover there are good reasons, as we shall see, why even Florentine itself cannot be directly identified with Italian. If our traveller were to have visited Florence a thousand years ago she would have noticed nothing special about its dialect. It would have been just another local variant, another ‘face in the crowd’, in the vast multitude of Romance vernaculars of Italy, no more or less distinguished or important—and no more or less ‘Italian’—than, say, the speech of Bologna, or Rome, or Naples, or Palermo, or indeed of some utterly obscure village. It should be added that the rise of municipal centres of power, during the later Middle Ages, tended to confer prestige on the speech of the relevant towns, which speakers in their respective spheres of influence sought to imitate, thereby actually accentuating the linguistic differences across the peninsula. In fact, well into the thirteenth century, Bolognese or Sicilian or Umbrian (in religious poetry, such as Iacopone da Todi and St Francis of Assisi), or Lombard (in didactic poetry, e.g., Bonvesin de la Riva, Barsegapé) enjoyed a cultural prestige as literary languages which Florentine would only acquire in the future. In any case, the Florentines of a thousand years ago would have been just as puzzled by the question of whether they spoke italiano as anybody else in Italy. So when did Italian begin?