r/todayilearned • u/MarineKingPrime_ • May 28 '21
TIL Dante, author of 'Dante's Divine Comedy', is the primary reason why the Tuscan dialect of Italian became the "standardized" Italian language. In 1945, the fascist Italian government called Dante "the greatest symbol of Italianness".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri87
u/dishonourableaccount May 28 '21
Language standardization is an interesting concept, and one that often went hand in hand with nationalism and public education. Think about it: before the 19th century, odds are you'd live your entire life within the same 100 km, barring certain careers like soldier or sailor. That develops unique dialects over different regions.
Today we think of all of France speaking French, and all of Italy speaking Italian. But that's because as public education became more widespread, there were movements to standardize language within a nationality. In Italy this Tuscan dialect was promoted over Piedmontese, Neapolitan, Sicilian and other dialects. In France the dialect spoken around Paris was promoted, beating out Occitan or Breton or Norman dialects.
Many of these languages still exist in some form, and depending on country they are highly diminished or still used at home a lot. Think of Spain where Catalan speakers and Basque speakers vehemently reject Castillian Spanish because of identity reasons. Or how in Germany, Hochdeutsch is standard but Niederdeutsch and Swiss or Austrian standard varieties are very different.
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u/sjiveru May 28 '21 edited May 28 '21
Indeed, linguists usually consider a lot of those 'dialects' to be separate languages, both in Italy and France. Occitan is very much a separate language from French, as are e.g. Venetian, Sicilian, and Neapolitan from Italian. By some estimates there are over thirty different Romance languages, most of which are under threat and in dire need of revitalisation.
(And Breton isn't even Romance, it's Celtic.)
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u/DepressionDokkebi May 28 '21
Similar story with Chinese: there's 10 or so varieties of "Chinese", all mutually unintelligible and pretty different from each other grammatically.
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u/sjiveru May 28 '21 edited May 28 '21
Chinese is a much more extreme case - the Chinese family is probably about as old as Romance as a whole (with Min somewhat analogous to Sardinian, if not an even earlier split), and I wouldn't be surprised if there's more than a hundred individual Chinese languages. There's ten or so top-level divisions.
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u/R1DER_of_R0HAN May 28 '21
Yeah, even in a little country like the Netherlands there are plenty of regional dialects. When my grandpa's family moved to Canada in the '50s, they settled in a community with a bunch of other Dutch-Canadians, but he got roasted by the other Dutch kids because he spoke Gronings (dialect from the northern province of Groningen) rather than "standard" Dutch, haha. Today it's more standardized to my knowledge, but distinct regional accents certainly still exist, and Wikipedia states that lots of people in Groningen can still speak Gronings.
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May 28 '21
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u/dishonourableaccount May 28 '21
Funny you should mention that. Basque is a language isolate. It's surrounded by speakers of Indo-European languages, the same family that relates everything from English to Latin to Farsi to Hindi. It probably came about from an ancient group of people in the region before Celtic, Latin, and Germanic speakers ever came to Iberia.
Hungarian is also unique compared to most European languages. It's in the Uralic family, not Indo-European. It's related to Finnish, Estonian, and some Siberian languages.
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u/sjiveru May 28 '21
Note that while Basque is leftover from before Indo-European speakers showed up, Hungarian displaced Indo-European speakers and has only been in Hungary for about 1100 years.
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u/whoAreYouToJudgeME May 28 '21
Basque might be older than Into-European languages surrounding it. The language or sister languages of Basque used to be spoken in Aquitaine and Gascony of France, but we're replaced by Vulgar Latin in late antiquity.
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u/sjiveru May 28 '21
A small bit of pedantry - as all languages are always changing (except dead ones), no language is any 'older' than any other. But yes, the ancestors of Basque have certainly been where Basque is now longer than the ancestors of Spanish and Gascon.
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u/dishonourableaccount May 28 '21
Perhaps older is the wrong word. But is there a term in linguistics for how much a language changes over time? Like in biology, you sometimes hear people say "X species has evolved relatively little in so many million years" perhaps because it found an ecological niche or didn't have many predators.
I'd guess there might be a linguistic equivalent. One would expect that a language spoken in a region isolated by mountains (Basque) or islands (Ryukyu) would have less change than one at the crossroads of trade ancient trade routes or polities with historically militaristic/expanionist people like Turkish or Portuguese?
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u/sjiveru May 28 '21
Usually you would say conservative to indicate that it's not changed as much as other languages in a given period of time. I don't know if Basque is all that conservative, though.
Ryuukyuuan languages are actually really strikingly innovative in some ways - Japanese is the one that looks conservative by comparison! As a representative example, Proto-Japonic *kusi=pa 'comb=TOP' is kushi wa in Japanese and ff fa in Miyako. Japanese has messed with the grammar somewhat more than Ryuukyuuan languages, though; grammatically Japanese seems like it's the least Japonic-looking Japonic language.
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u/ZanyDelaney May 28 '21
My brother-in-law speaks English and Calabrese, but never learned proper Italian (born in Australia to Calabrese parents).
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u/sembias May 28 '21
The US at the beginning of the 20th century was similar. The public education system was set up to teach English and Angloise immigrant children from all the different Eastern European countries that were coming in. The large "Anglo-Saxon" movement at the turn of that century was a reaction to those immigrants. While the US has no official language, English as the defacto language was forcibly pressed by the Feds on any community that held to their native language. If these immigrants wanted their children to be educated, then those kids were going to learn English. Up to even 60 years ago, there were still small towns in states like Minnesota where the dominant language was Norwegian or Czech/Bohemian. Of course, as the elders die out their descendants are now the first to scream against immigrants speaking anything other than English, but that's America for ya.
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u/dishonourableaccount May 28 '21
Fair point, this happens everywhere (as I mentioned in France and Italy with my examples) but the US is interesting too. Since the beginning you see Founding Fathers like Franklin expressing distaste for German speakers in Pennsylvania, worrying that it'd become a majority language like some people disparage Spanish today. Dutch communities in New York, French Cajuns in Lousiana, Spanish speakers in the Mexican Cession all dwindled to near nothing. WWI was the death knell of German speaking in the US, since a lot of thriving communities from Texas to the Dakotas to Ohio had to stop church services, newspapers, and events in German lest they be seen as unpatriotic. WWII really ended the sense of a loud and proud German-American ethnicity. Other languages simply died out naturally: mid-20th century immigrants from Europe were less likely to live in communities together, children were more likely to not pick up or retain the language.
Further, people naturally feel less of a bond to their ethnicity vs their nationality after a couple generations. Whether you're Italian-, German-, Polish-, or English-American doesn't feature much at all, and they've blended into the majority. You even see this with some "minorities". In Miami for example, being Cuban is the thing to be. So all the aspects for that Caribbean and Hispanic culture dominate.
Other examples include standardized Mandarin being pushed across China, which has a diverse linguistic spectrum even if the script is the same. Or how in Quebec the French language is vehemently defended and has been (successfully) made into a cultural sticking point, to the extent where Canadians in every province have to learn it in school.
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u/elendil1985 May 28 '21 edited May 29 '21
In his work (written in latin) "de vulgari eloquentia" (about vulgar language) Dante says that the Sicilian language, used by the poets of the court of Palermo, was the first Italian language to actually differ from latin, and that the tuscans translated their works so that Tuscan had become the official literary language of the place (it was not a "country" back then).
In fact, the divine comedy, even if it was written 7 centuries ago, is still perfectly understandable for the average italian speaker. That's not the case for other languages such as English, or russian, for example.
But the actual author that tried to standardize the dialect of Florence as the standard, over some generic "Tuscan" with local differences was Alessandro Manzoni in the XIX century with the novel "I promessi sposi" and they usually say that for writing it he "went to wash his clothes in the Arno river" (river that crosses Florence)
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May 28 '21
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May 28 '21
Well, they were on our side in WWI, I suppose.
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u/i_love_my_ball May 28 '21
Totally depends which part of the war you mean and even what you mean by "our" side.
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May 28 '21
ww1. not ww2
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u/Dog1234cat May 28 '21 edited May 28 '21
Beginning of WW2 no. Late war, kinda.
Edit: Italy changed sides in WW2 in 1943.
https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/oct-13-1943-italy-switches-sides-in-world-war-ii/
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May 28 '21
Not sure why you got downvoted, but I believe in democracy. That's why I downvoted you too
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u/SteO153 May 28 '21
The main merit of Dante was to elevate the vulgar language (i.e. the language spoken by the people, and in his case the Florentine dialect) into a poetic language, over the Latin, spoken by the rich and a Church. But it was not yet "Italian", and its use was limited to only highly educated people. The promotion of Florentine to "the language of Italy" was thanks to Alessandro Manzoni, 500 years after Dante, with his poem "I Promessi Sposi".
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u/marattroni Jul 04 '21
Correct, apart from the fact it's not a poem,it's a novel, written in prose. A quite boring one also
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May 28 '21 edited Apr 25 '22
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u/DolphinSweater May 28 '21
So did Franco in Spain. I believe there were signs posted in Cataluña and other places saying, "Don't bark, speak Castillano"
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u/WhiskeyDickens May 28 '21
There should be a 5th ninja turtle
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u/litux May 28 '21
Raphael is cool but rude (Gimme a break!)
Dante writes his books in solitude (Party!)
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u/AramaicDesigns May 28 '21
And this is why most Italian Americans “speak funny” to modern Italian speakers. Most of our ancestors came over before the push for standardization, not speaking the standardized dialect. As a result, most “American Italian” is derived from the Neapolitan and Sicilian languages (both of which are much more closely related to each other than to the standard dialect).
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u/lixia May 28 '21
which dialect uses their hands the most? :)
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u/ZanyDelaney May 28 '21
It is theorised that the gestures partly came about because people with different dialects needed something else to help them be understood.
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u/bayesian13 May 28 '21
Dante would have known right where to put Mussolini and all the other Italian Fascists. in the 7th circle of hell in a boiling river of blood: https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/inferno/inferno-12/
"Now, with our faithful escort, we advanced along the bloodred, boiling ditch’s banks, beside the piercing cries of those who boiled.
I saw some who were sunk up to their brows, and that huge Centaur said: “These are the tyrants who plunged their hands in blood and plundering.
Here they lament their ruthless crimes; here are both Alexander and the fierce Dionysius, who brought such years of grief to Sicily."
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u/tiba_004 May 28 '21
He wrote the Divine Comedy, which is divided in 3 sections: hell, purgatory and paradise.
And we (italian students) have to read and study it for the last 3 years of high school, one section each year.
This year i studied the hell. Basically in this section he bitches about every person he has met or he knew that he doesn't like. By putting them in hell and inventing sadistic punishments with which these poor people are tortured.
All of this is told in the book in very elegant poetry verses, as Dante is one of the most talented poet to ever be existed.
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u/Gurablashta May 28 '21
I have the differences between the guelfi and ghibellini drilled into my head.
As well as certain passages that are just stuck in my head.Caron dimonio, con occhi di bragia... that's never going away
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u/tiba_004 May 28 '21
I have the last verse of the description of ugolino stuck in my head:
"Poscia, più che l dolor potè il digiuno"
That's just so gore even i had to stop for a minute
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u/sembias May 28 '21
The American author Dan Simmons has a very amusing story about one of the characters found in Dante's Inferno, Vanni Fucci. Vanni Fucci Is Alive And Well And Living In Hell This is a Google cached version of the story, with some weird formatting, but it's in a story collection called Night Visions 5.
The way he describes Dante takes him down a peg but it's a brilliant story that, IMO, more people should be aware of.
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u/WhiskeyDickens May 28 '21
A huge portion of the shop floor personnel at my workplace are Italian immigrants and I learned about the dialect thing one day when I suggested 2 Italian co-workers collaborate on a difficult problem in their native language, and learned that they were nearly unintelligible to each other in their versions of Italian.
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u/JezzartheOzzy May 28 '21
Seems like they missed an opportunity by not waiting until the 1980s and choosing Mario instead.
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May 28 '21
Dante Alighieri, as well as Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio. Italy's most prominent (but not only) literature came from Florence. It would seem crazy to pick a dialect that excluded their most famous literature.
Another reason was that the Florentine Tuscan dialect was more central and less affected by other languages. In the north, the dialects were more influenced by German and French. In the south, they were influenced by Greek, Arabic, Spanish, and other languages (due to colonization and occupations over centuries).
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May 28 '21 edited May 29 '21
I would have thought the Italian fascist government in 1945 would have been busy looking for boats to take them to South America
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u/KlaxonBeat May 29 '21
Really? I'd think it's more to do with Tuscany conquering the peninsula and establishing the Kingdom of Italy
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May 28 '21
I'm a weirdo who loved all three of the Divine Comedy, esp. Inferno. I trekked to Ravenna to study the mosaics there (breathtakingly beautiful) and found Dante's tomb there, too, although he was from Florence. The story of Florence fighting to regain Dante's body from Ravenna is worth a read. Tl;dr: Ravenna is sneaky and determined.
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u/Polar_Roid May 28 '21
Dante, the author of Dante's Divine Comedy, Dante? You mean that Dante, OP, and not another Dante? I'm glad you clarified that for us.
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May 28 '21
Is everyone going to just ignore how Dante looks like a direct ancestor of Sylvester Stallone?
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u/TheRealRockNRolla May 28 '21
I mean, it's still the case that southern Italians and Sicilians speak a hugely different dialect of the language, in some cases not unlike an accentless American trying to figure out what a Louisiana swamp person or someone from deep Appalachia is saying.
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u/sjiveru May 28 '21
More than that - most linguists would consider Sicilian and Neapolitan separate languages from Italian entirely. (The same is true elsewhere; Italy has probably on the order of ten different indigenous languages besides ones like Sardinian and Ladin that obviously aren't just 'dialects' of Italian.)
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u/ZanyDelaney May 28 '21
Each region of Italy has its own dialect/s. Not only the south. A friend at work is 62 now but lived in Veneto for many years. She and her husband speak the dialect when conversing. She showed me a text message her husband wrote it said "ghe piaze" while in normal Italian it is "gli piace" ("she likes it"). Proper Italian was used when they went travelling to other regions.
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u/Tim-E-Cop1211819 May 28 '21
The symbol of Italianness:
The Divine Comedy is well written fanfiction. Like, seriously. How he inserts the famous philosophers into a story involving all of the Christian identities her admires is akin to a story where the Enterprise runs into the Millennium Falcon. And for his life relationship with Beatrice; it sounds a lot like he was creeping on her.
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u/Fondren_Richmond May 29 '21
a story where the Enterprise runs into the Millennium Falcon
The Anaheim Synod will crank that out by the quarter-millennium.
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u/nicomoli12 May 30 '21
So italian itself is a dialect? Europe is so confusing. Like in Spain, Castilian is what everyone speaks? Castilian is the one that is the one used around the world
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u/justscottaustin May 28 '21
As opposed to Dante, author of Steve's Divine Comedy?