A Modern Questione della Lingua: The Incomplete Standardization of Italian in a Northern Italian Town

Abstract

Although it seems from most scholarly accounts and everyday experience in Italy that the questione della lingua or language question has been definitively answered-and that Italian has emerged victorious over local vernaculars—approximately 60% of Italians continue to speak their local languages in addition to Italian. This article explores why these languages, which Italians call ‘dialects,’ continues to matter in Italy from the vantage point of one northern Italian town, Bergamo. It traces debates about language over the last two centuries, locates recurring themes during the standardization of Italian, and argues that this standardization remains incomplete. Repeatedly, socioeconomic shifts have proved more decisive than political action, although the language question has at times been deeply politicized. Indeed, at particular moments—immediately following Unification, the Fascist period, the Economic Miracle of the 1950s and '60s, during the Leftist movement during the 1960s and '70s, and the emergence of the Northern League—language has stood in for larger concerns about the state of the nation and its citizens.