Italian Dialects - Origins

The dialects of modern Italian all have their roots in the spoken form of Latin (Vulgar Latin) that was in use throughout the Roman Empire. Vulgar Latin had definitely its own local peculiarities before the fall of the Empire. The political instability that followed Roman rule kept Italy from re-uniting as a nation until the nineteenth century. This long period of fragmentation and also the fact that Classical Latin was preferred as the international language of study allowed the various modes of speech to develop on their own until they could almost be called separate languages. Many dialects are, in fact, unintelligible with each other.