Mother tongues and other reflections on the Italian language

Italian is unique among modern European languages, for although it has a history going back eight centuries, it has only consolidated as a spoken national language during the 20th century.

Previously, it was a written, literary language, and people spoke regional dialects that were strikingly different from each other.

This has intriguing implications for understanding notions such as mother tongue, native speaker and literary language, and Giulio Lepschy discusses these and other issues in this collection of six scholarly essays on the Italian language.Lepschy also explores a little understood aspect of Italian prosody (the system of secondary stresses), and analyzes a Venetian play of the Renaissance, "La Veniexiana", in which a "gendered" reading helps to clarify some grammatically controversial passages.

These aspects of the play had been examined by Carlo Dionisotti, the eminent Italianist whose life and works are the subject of the final essay.

Lepschy's approach aims to combine the insights of modern linguistic theory and the findings of original philological investigations.