Sociolinguistic variation in spoken Italian: An introduction

In Italo-Romance, as well as in most European scenarios, the current language space between base dialects and standard results from a previous situation of ‘spoken diglossia’ (cf. Auer 2005). In fact, until at least the second half of the nineteenth century, Italian was used by a small minority of the population and almost exclusively in writing and formal speech; the vast majority of the population was composed of nearly monolingual dialect speakers, and local dialects were basically the sole languages for daily use.