$<pa1n1025><cg1n4097><ca1l1><cb1l1>The History of Italian<cg1n4098><ca1l0><cb1l0>
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$<pa1n1025>The linguistic unification of Italy came about gradually through the spread of a language that developed from the Tuscan dialect, more precisely Florentine.
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$ It became a superior language, which was used in politics, in administration and in communications;
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$ Latin survived, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries, as the language of culture and of the Church.
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$<pa1n1025>After an initial period in which the various dialects vied for supremacy, the prodigious economic growth, the social and commercial development and the cultural expansion of Florence, led to the adoption over the centuries of its dialect as the common Italian tongue.
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$ The Florentine vernacular that later became the Italian language was used, for a long time, only as a literary language, and it was encouraged by men of letters such as Pietro Bembo and the Academicians of Crusca;
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$ the majority of the people used their regional dialect.
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$ Italian also underwent a slow lexical and syntactical improvement, due in part to the principal writers of the 19th century:
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$ Foscolo, Leopardi, and above all, Manzoni.
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$ The majority of Italians now speak Italian and regional dialects are used less and less.
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$<pa1n1025>Ladin, one of the dialects which is derived from Latin, is spoken in the Dolomite valleys and principally, in the Friuli region (around 900,000 inhabitants) where there is a lively use of the regional tongue with Italian.
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$ In Piedmont, particularly in the provinces of Cuneo and Turin, many people continue to speak Occitan, a dialect similar to that spoken in southern France.
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$ The migration of the Albanians who fled the Turkish invasion of the 15th century, led to the birth of ôToscaö: a variety of Albanian that continues to be the main tongue for many of the inhabitants of Molise and Calabria.
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$ Finally, the population of Alghero in Sardinia speaks Catalan.
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$<pa1n1025>There are two bilingual regions in Italy:
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$ that is, where the use of Italian is on the same level with French, as in the Aosta Valley, or German, as in the parity of French and Italian in public documents, in schools and in civil life.
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$ The German minority in Italy inhabits a large area of Trentino Alto Adige, where both Italian and German are recognized as the official language.
