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Are you familiar with the origins and development of the Italian language? Do you know what local Italian dialect became the language of a new nation? Test your knowledge of the history of the Italian language with this quiz. All of the answers can be found in the feature History of the Italian Language.

Questions| Answers

1. Linguistically speaking, the Italian language is a member of the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages.
2. False: Italian, like the other Romance languages, is the direct offspring of the Latin spoken by the Romans.
3. Of all the major Romance languages, Italian retains the closest resemblance to Latin.
4. During the long period of the evolution of Italian, many dialects sprang up.
5. Of all the Italian dialects, Tuscan departs least in morphology and phonology from classical Latin.
6. Florentine culture produced the three literary artists who best summarized Italian thought and feeling of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance: Renaissance: Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio.
7. Brunetto Latini was the 13th century Italian author who contributed to the development of allegorical and didactic poetry.
8. Florentine writers used all their knowledge of science and philosophy in a delicate and detailed analysis of love.
9. True: The Chroniclers were men of the merchant class whose involvement in city affairs inspired them to write tales in the vulgar tongue.
10. Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy is one of the great works of world literature.
11. False: Dante defended his argument that in literature the vulgar tongue could rival Latin in two unfinished treatises, De vulgari eloquentia and Convivio.
12. Francesco Petrarca was born in Arezzo.
13. Petrarca wrote love poetry in the vulgar tongue.
14. Boccaccio's Decameron consists of one hundred stories told by characters who are also part of a story that provides the setting for the whole.
15. Boccaccio was the first to write a commentary on Dante.
16. «La questione della lingua» or the question of the language was an attempt to establish linguistic norms and codify the Italian language.
17. The Accademia della Crusca was founded in 1583.
18. In 1525 the Venetian Pietro Bembo set out his proposals for a standardized language and style in Prose della volgar lingua.
19. The language of Italian literature is modeled on that spoken in Florence in the 15th century.
20. False: It was not until the 19th century that the language spoken by educated Tuscans spread to become the language of a new nation.

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