On the political value of philology. Ernesto Monaci and the study of dialects between the 19th and 20th centuries in Italy

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine Ernesto Monaci's role in the debate about the spread of the standard language in a predominantly dialect-speaking country. In a contest dominated by linguistic particularism, such as that of post-unification Italy, the spread of a common language was seen as a major need, and various strategies were proposed by writers, philologists, glottologists, politicians, and intellectuals in general. Monaci was a firm believer in the role of philological studies, and dialectology in particular, in the field of education: convinced that dialects are the expression of a great cultural richness, he argued for the importance of a profound knowledge of them in order to teach the Italian language through a comparative approach. During the years of the First World War, when the need to consolidate the national consciousness of Italians was at its greatest, he devoted himself to the publication of school manuals based on the didactic model that took students from dialect to standard language; at the same time, in his university courses, he reaffirmed the importance of dialectological studies in the face of linguistic issues that, in those years, served as a pretext for legitimising precise political choices. Both in school textbooks and in university courses, Monaci proposed an approach based on the study of the local literary tradition on the one hand, and on the living voice of the speakers on the other, as the two main sources on which linguistic analysis should be based.