“MICROACCENTS” IN ITALY.

“MICROACCENTS” IN ITALY. I have posted, for example here, about how long a time it took for France, with a centralized government, to establish French as a uniform national language (“Only about 11% of the population of France spoke French at the time of the French Revolution. There were some 55 major dialects and hundreds of subdialects.” The story in Italy was similar, as this article by Dan Nosowitz explains. Italy was unified during roughly the period between 1861 and 1914. Each of the separate areas (such as Sardinia, Rome, Tuscany, Venice, and Sicily) which became part of Italy had a separate “language”, which was somewhat related to modern Italian. As for modern Italian, one language was selected by the central government to be the national language and that was Tuscan, possibly as a tribute to Dante. It took a long time after 1914 for that standard Italian to take effect, just as it took a long time for standard French to take effect.