…the island of Corsica a Tuscan variety of Italian is spoken, though Italian is not the language of culture. Overseas (e.g., in the United States, Brazil, and Argentina) speakers sometimes do not know the standard language and use only dialect forms. Increasingly, they only rarely know the language of their…

…in one Italian dialect: in Tuscan, there occur porta “door,” la forta “the door,” tre porte “three doors,” from Latin porta, illa porta, tres portae. In both cases, consonant weakening has spread from word to sentence; there is a common development, but it cannot be claimed that it is distinctively…

…end of that century, however, Tuscan was emerging as the primary vernacular, and Dante’s choice of it for his The Divine Comedy ensured its preeminence. Of lyric poets writing in Tuscan (hereafter called Italian), the greatest was Petrarch. His canzoni, or songs, and sonnets in praise of Laura are revealing…

…standard language, and recommended 14th-century Tuscan as the model for Italian literary language. His view, opposed by those who wanted Latin and by others who wanted a more modern Italian as the model, had triumphed by the end of the 16th century. Bembo’s history of Venice, which he wrote in…

…for the purpose of purifying Tuscan, the literary language of the Italian Renaissance. Partially through the efforts of its members, the Tuscan dialect, particularly as it had been employed by Petrarch and Boccaccio, became the model for Italian literature in the 16th and 17th centuries.