From Attitudes to Usage: The Dynamics of Linguistic Prestige in Early Modern Italy

Sixteenth-century Italy saw the codification and promotion of a literary variety based on archaic Florentine. Exploring the reception of this variety across different social groups and contexts beyond the literary sphere, this book critically examines the ubiquitous, yet somewhat controversial notion of linguistic prestige. It brings together investigation of metalinguistic sources, used to reconstruct language attitudes, and the analysis of a corpus of everyday letters spanning over eighty years – the correspondence of the Buonarroti family – which serves to track the influence of the emerging literary variety at the level of informal writings and across different social classes.