“A language that reigns in the city” : Italian in grammar books for foreigners (second half of the 18th century)

Abstract

While they emphasize the large circulation and the cultural domination of the Italian language, Italian grammar books published in Europe from the second half of the sixteenth century onward reveal the hybrid characteristic of a language that was perceived both as a dead and a living language. Applied to Italian, the concept of a dead language was based on an archaic and fundamentally written and literary model, that of the great fourteenth-century Tuscan authors. Compared to the codification of the written language, the oral dimension was far from being stable throughout Italy before the 1861 political unification. Here I present a few of the leading Italian grammar books published in France and in England beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century. This chapter shows how the spoken language was described in its use and, more generally, the model of Italian presented to the readers.