L’Anima Plebea Del Lessico Italiano

Abstract

On the basis of a historical and materialist conception of language, with particular attention to lexicon, we emphasize Italian’s par-ticular sociolinguistic features, such as the singular great number of dif-ferent languages spoken in the Peninsula, and the diglossia immanent to all its human communities, particularly in the past, but still observable. A sociolinguistic situation in which the dialectical relationship between unity and diversity is tangible. However, the main objective of this paper is to emphasize the fact that the intimate, continuous and dialectical re-lationships between the many peninsular languages determined a current standard Italian with profoundly plebeian features. The analysis of these structural, functional and pragmatic characteristics, somehow little em-phasized by historical linguistic, has been carried out from a materialist and dialectical perspective, seeking to demonstrate that they were gene-rated, throughout history, mainly by so many real linguistic productions of speakers engaged in class conflicts.