Latin and the vernacular

Language was the object of keener scrutiny in the Quattrocento than it had ever been before. Contributing to the intensity of the debates was the enhanced study of rhetoric, and the consequent appreciation of language as an instrument of communication used to enlighten, move and delight its hearers. Italian humanists assumed a disparity between spoken vernaculars, seen as inferior, and written Latin (grammatica), deemed superior because it was ‘fixed’ by rules. But they also grew aware that Latin itself was not ‘fixed’, and that medieval Latin, termed ‘barbaric’ since Petrarch, differed substantially from classical Latin, both lexically and syntactically. Some humanists then distinguished between a volgare illustre, a prestigious written vernacular to be used by poets and scholars, and the Babel of spoken regional dialects that existed in Italy – a situation now called diglossia.

In ancient Rome, humanists asked, what had been the relationship between the language spoken by Romans and the written language of, say, Cicero? Acrimonious exchanges began in 1435, when Flavio Biondo wrote to Leonardo Bruni that, unlike modern Italians, the ancient Romans both spoke and wrote fundamentally the same language. Guarino Veronese was surprised to observe how well modern, even unlettered Greeks spoke the same language that scholars wrote, and believed that this monolingualism also held for ancient Rome. Bruni himself differed: bilingualism reigned in ancient Rome, with one language for the uneducated (like the vernacular in contemporary Italy), and another used by educated writers like Cicero.