Italian, literary language?: the influence of the Prose della Volgar Lingua on contemporary Italian

Abstract

This article aims to show why Italian can still be called a literary language in which the distance between writing and orality, between spontaneous and controlled and cultured language is still so marked. In short, we want to clarify how the peculiarity of Italian linguistic history, which goes by the name of “questione della lingua”, contributes to determining what Italian is still today. We are indeed convinced that the authoritativeness of Bembo’s theses, exposed in the Prose della volgar lingua, his posthumous fortune, as well as the use and arrangement that was given by the Accademici della Crusca, have in fact led to one separation between spoken and written language, determining during the course of a secular history many of the phenomena that still characterize Italian culture today.