La lingua della Chiesa

The role played by the Church in the spreading of the Italian language was crucial. Until the start of the Council of Trento (1542 -1563) the Church had been contributing to the spreading of the vernacular languages, but it is from the sixteenth century that its role became extremely important in the expansion of the unitary language. Despite the prohibition to translate the Bible and the liturgical texts, the Church performed, through the preaching and the catechesis, an action of such intensity to forge deeper styles of life, with important consequences for the history of Italian language. The essay focuses mainly on the Modern Age, when the words of the Church firmly enter the Italian language and the dialects stratifying factors of identity. Besides the effects of the preaching, the essay studies, for the first time with sufficient attention, the results obtained by the catechism schools through different texts of doctrine in Italian and in dialect.