AHC/WI: Italy settles on Latin as standard?

Redcoat

Banned
This is just a thread I made on the fly, I know pretty well that the likelihood of this isn't high, but I'm still wondering. So OTL Italy had many different dialects across the nation by the time of unification, many were arguably different languages outright, so a standard form of Italian was needed for the nation. IIRC they chose a version mainly based on that of Florence as the famous Italian poet Dante came from there. But what if Italy decided switch to a form of Vulgar or Classical Latin?
 
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Italy_(disambiguation)

??? The Ostrogoths and the HRE subdivision would beg to differ.

I agree it’s impossible just by linguistic drift (that predates the fall of the WRE) unless Tuscan is renamed to Latin or something.

Well, technically all these kingdoms were always tributaries/vassals/subdivisions/somewhat dependent of the Romans/Byzantines/HRE, thus, not necessarily an (independent) political entity.

But, going back to the OP, Latin WAS the administration and cultural language of not only Italy but most of the Catholic World up until the 18th century. Educate the people to speak it is a different issue.
 

Redcoat

Banned
There's no such thing as Italy as a political entity before 1861, so I'd say it's impossible.
Yes, that's what I mean. When Italy unified in the 1800s, get it to make a form of Vulgar or Classical Latin the standard language.
 

Redcoat

Banned
Educate the people to speak it is a different issue.
Well Latin and Italian dialects aren't too far away from the other. And besides that, by the time of the Revolution, very few outside the Paris area spoke the Parisian dialect.
 

Brunaburh

Gone Fishin'
Well, technically all these kingdoms were always tributaries/vassals/subdivisions/somewhat dependent of the Romans/Byzantines/HRE, thus, not necessarily an (independent) political entity.

But, going back to the OP, Latin WAS the administration and cultural language of not only Italy but most of the Catholic World up until the 18th century. Educate the people to speak it is a different issue.

Apart from England, where we changed to French in the 13 century, and slowly transitioned to English from the 15th to the 18th
 
Well Latin and Italian dialects aren't too far away from the other.

Well, they kinda are. You can surely get some of the words, but the meaning of a Classical Latin sentence is simply not understandable to any modern Romance language speaker, as Modern Romance is highly analytic and Classical Latin is highly synthetic - ie. we lost most of Latin's inflexion.

And besides that, by the time of the Revolution, very few outside the Paris area spoke the Parisian dialect.

There's a dialect continuum which makes things a lot easier. Latin wasn't spoken outside churches or universities.
 
Just a thought, but wouldn't there be a few secularists in the Italian government who would oppose the use of Latin to downplay the influence of the Catholic Church?
 
Just a thought, but wouldn't there be a few secularists in the Italian government who would oppose the use of Latin to downplay the influence of the Catholic Church?
Probably not a lot. Secularists tended to love the Roman heritage. Point is, everyone in Italy agrees that Italian is, well, a modern form of Latin, which is incidentally reasonably correct.
 
Standard Italian is the evolution of a form of Vulgar Latin.

You're right, but the term Vulgar Latin doesn't actually mean what the OP think it means, VL isn't a structured language, it's just a term used to categorize an intermediate phase between Classical Latin and Modern Romance languages.
 
You need an awfully old POD to avoid Tuscan being the standard dialect of Italy, considering it was the dialect of choice of as far back as Dante and Machiavelli and was spoken even in the court of the Venetian Doge.
 
You need an awfully old POD to avoid Tuscan being the standard dialect of Italy, considering it was the dialect of choice of as far back as Dante and Machiavelli and was spoken even in the court of the Venetian Doge.
It's easy with a little papal mind control
 
It's the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and you just have made an entire nation illiterate.
Most Italians were illiterate in 1860 anyway. And of course, some of the literate ones knew Latin as well.
However, there would be no reason to switch to Classical or Church Latin entirely in the context of Italian unification barring a fairly early POD whereby Standard Italian does not develop (or does not become the standard) which in turn, significantly reduces the chances for any sort of Italian unification movement. Before unification, the standard literary language was pretty much the only things Italians had in common to the exclusion of other groups, so it would be arguably the main basis for the feeling of an Italian national identity.
Of course, the topic was hotly debated, as most intellectuals understood very clearly that most Italians did not actually know or understand the literary language, and many felt that Something Had To Be Done. AFAIK, IOTL no one seriously entertained reviving Latin.
 
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