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

Sixteenth-century Italy witnessed what scholars have termed a linguistic revolution, with the codification and promotion of a literary variety based on archaic Florentine. From Attitudes to Usage explores how this variety was received across different social groups and beyond the literary sphere. Examining the ubiquitous, yet somewhat controversial notion of linguistic prestige, the book brings together the investigation of metalinguistic sources and the analysis of a corpus of everyday letters. While the former are used to reconstruct language attitudes, the analysis of the correspondence of the Buonarroti family serves to track the influence of the emerging literary variety at the level of informal writings and across different social classes.