Dialect levelling and merchant writing in Renaissance Italy: Special issue of Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics on “The Role of Merchants in Language Standardisation”

This article aims to assess the extent to which merchant language in Renaissance Italy can be said to have undergone a process of dialect levelling. Merchant letters in the Italian context are characterised by their high degree of verb allomorphy, both verbal and nominal. Previous investigations have shown that this degree of allomorphy is much more present in merchant texts than in other text genres immediately preceding codification in the 1500s. This article continues this line of research, showing how a process of dialect levelling occurs in a corpus of merchant writing sent from Milan in the late 1300s and early 1400s. Specifically, it focuses on 1pl. verb endings and the presence of voicing in past participles to show that Tuscan linguistic items infiltrated and then spread into neighbouring dialectal areas, such as Gallo-Italian, that is typologically distinct from Tuscan. Since this process of levelling was occurring at the same time as literary Tuscan was spreading, sometimes mediated also by merchants, the article also discusses these issues. While focus is placed on the contribution of merchant language in Renaissance Italy, the article can be seen as a case-study as evidence of language evolution ‘from below’. Overall, it argues that historical sociolinguistics provide powerful tools which help to show the various processes identified during standardization.