Editing Italian language (section)

=== Contemporary times ===
[[File:Francesco Hayez 040.jpg|thumb|[[Alessandro Manzoni]] is famous for the novel ''[[The Betrothed (Manzoni novel)|The Betrothed]]'' (1827), ranked among the masterpieces of world literature.<ref name="britannica">{{Cite web|url=https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alessandro-Manzoni|title=Alessandro Manzoni &#124; Italian author|website=Encyclopedia Britannica|date=18 May 2023}}</ref> He contributed to the nationwide use of the Italian language.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://manzoni.classicauthors.net/IPromessiSposiOrTheBetrothed/IPromessiSposiOrTheBetrothed1.html|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20110718073016/http://manzoni.classicauthors.net/IPromessiSposiOrTheBetrothed/IPromessiSposiOrTheBetrothed1.html|url-status=dead|title=I Promessi sposi or The Betrothed|archivedate=18 July 2011}}</ref>]]
The publication of Italian literature's first modern novel, {{lang|it|I promessi sposi}} (''[[The Betrothed (Manzoni novel)|The Betrothed]]'') by [[Alessandro Manzoni]], both reflected and furthered the growing trend towards Italian as a national standard language. Manzoni, a Milanesian, chose to write the book in the Florentine dialect, describing this choice, in the preface to his 1840 edition, as "rinsing" his Milanese "in the waters of the [[Arno River|Arno]]" ([[Florence]]'s river). The novel is commonly described as "the most widely read work in the Italian language".<ref name="Betrothed">{{cite web|url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704422204576130253915553800|title=The Great Italian Novel, a Love Story|first=William|last=Amelia|date=12 February 2011|work=The Wall Street Journal}}</ref> It became a model for subsequent Italian literary fiction,<ref name="Betrothed"/> helping to galvanize national linguistic unity around the Florentine dialect.

This growth was relative; linguistic diversity continued during the [[unification of Italy]] (1848–1871). The Italian linguist [[Tullio De Mauro]] estimated that only 2.5% of Italy's population could speak the Italian standardized language properly in 1861,<ref>De Mauro, Tullio. ''Storia linguistica dell'Italia unita''. Bari: Laterza, 1963.</ref> while Arrigo Castellani estimated the same value as 10%.<ref>{{cite journal|author=Arrigo Castellani |date=1982 |newspaper=Studi linguistici italiani |number=8 |pp=3–26 |title=Quanti erano gli italofoni nel 1861?}}<!-- auto-translated from Italian by Module:CS1 translator --></ref><ref>Colombo, Michele, and John J. Kinder. "Italian as a Language of Communication in Nineteenth Century Italy and Abroad". Italica 89, no. 1 (2012): 109–21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41440499. ("De Mauro started from the principle that only the inhabitants of Tuscany and Rome could easily speak the common (literary) language without a great amount of schooling, because their dialects were close to Italian. For all other Italians, it is reasonable to assume that only those who had attended at least some years of the secondary school were able to speak Italian.
Given these assumptions, De Mauro (34-43) estimated that, in 1861, only 630,000 citizens, in a population of more than 25 million inhabitants, were speakers of the national language: that is, in the united Italy of the nineteenth century only 2.5% of the population was able to speak Italian. Some years later, Arrigo Castellani adjusted the percentage, arguing on the basis of new criteria that almost one-tenth of Italians spoke Italian as their everyday language in 1861.")</ref>

After Unification, a huge number of civil servants and soldiers recruited from all over the country introduced many more words and idioms from their home languages. For example, {{lang|it|[[ciao]]}} is derived from the [[Venetian language|Venetian]] word {{lang|vec|s-cia[v]o}} ('slave', that is 'your servant'), and {{lang|it|[[panettone]]}} comes from the [[Lombard language|Lombard]] word {{lang|lmo|panetton}}.