Recommended Reading
The Italian language, like French, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian, developed from Latin. Certainly not the classical Latin of Cicero and Caesar but the one spoken by the common people during the middle-ages. In that period classical Latin was no longer spoken as it was no longer known and its use was relegated to writers and scholars. In the streets we hear a new language developing: the vernacular. By 1300 in Tuscany vernacular is used by poets and writers such as Boccaccio, Dante and Petrarch, the fathers of Italian literature.
Due to the economic and cultural development in Florence at that time Florentine becomes the language of business and politics. Little by little Florentine and Italian begin to mean the same.
However, when Italy becomes a unified state in 1861, the country is still lacking a true national language. Not everyone understands it and only a minority can speak it. The least educated persist in communicating in their regional dialect - some of which, like the Neapolitan and Venetian are considered proper languages. For a long time Italy remains a country linguistically divided although currently almost the whole population knows Italian and about 75% use it regularly.
