L'impact sur l'Italie des débats français sur la langue au milieu du XVIe siècle

While Sperone Speroni’s Dialogo delle lingue is usually considered the primary source of Joachim Du Bellay’s Deffence et Illustration de la langue françoyse, the impact of French linguistic thought on late sixteenth-century Italy is far more difficult to ascertain. In opposition to French, which quickly constructs itself as the instrument of the rising hegemonic French state, Italian, widely used around the Mediterranean as a lingua franca, does not conform to a strict nationalistic program. On all fronts a language in contact, Italian, as portrayed in the Dialogo delle lingue, must be seen in a context of a prevalent cultural heterogeneity.