Dante and "La Questione della Lingua"

Building off of Jun's post, I did some more research on Dante's impact on Italian and the development of the language more generally. It's interesting to see how this dialect from Florence came to become the standard for modern Italian, but as you might imagine this was not a straightforward process. In fact, there is an Italian phrase, "La questione della Lingua" (The question of the language) that refers to the debate over how the Italian language should be established in standardized that lasted centuries.

As Jun alludes to, Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch played an important role by being some of the first writers to take writing in the vernacular seriously. Dante did this very knowingly, and he even wrote an unfinished essay in latin named De Vulgari Eloquentia that considered languages and writing in the vernacular. Dante attempts to discuss the idea of an "illustrious vernacular" that would be suitable for writing serious works in instead of Latin. Later Italians especially in the 16th century pointed to this work and the great literature of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch as the gold standard for Italian, which helped  the Florentine dialect being adopted around the entire country of Italy. Interesting, some thinkers like Pietro Bembo pointed to Petrarch as the gold standard with his more formal and lyrical verse rather than Dante.

Just as important as Florence's literary dominance, however, was its political and economic dominance for much of Italy's history. For the centuries after Dante lived and especially during the Renaissance, Florence held great influence on the rest of Italy. This was particularly important because there was a lack of united Italian identity well until the Risorgimento in the 19th century. Because of this lack of identity, it was not an easy process where everyone just decided "Well Florence has good literature so the Florentine dialect will be the standard for Italian" as there was no strong conception of being Italian. By the 16th century or so, many academics and noble people advocated for the Florentine language to be held as the standard across the Italian peninsula, but many common people did not follow suit. Technological developments such as the printing press led to more widespread written works, which helped standardize the language some. The development of the Florentine dialect into a standard language for all of Italy was as complicated as the development of Italian identity itself, but Dante and other Middle Age writers played an important role in promoting the vernacular.