The article is devoted to the functioning of personal and deictic pronouns in comedies of Italian authors of the 16th century. It is believed that main changes in comparison with the italiano standard that have occurred at the present stage of language development concern the system of pronouns. However, when analyzing comedies of natives of the central, northern and southern regions, phenomena characteristic of the current stage of the development of the Italian language and considered innovative were found: the use of pronouns lui, lei and loro in the syntactic functions of the subject; double dative; simplification of the threepart system of demonstrative pronouns; the spread of truncated forms sto and sta and some others. The revealed contexts give reason to think that the Italian language at present time does not develop unprecedented phenomena, but rather undergoes a process of restandardization, in which oral and written speech converge and features that were previously characteristic exclusively of informal communication are normalized. The dialect has a substrate effect on the Italian language not only in synchrony, but also in diachrony.