While Sperone Speroni’s Dialogo delle lingue is usually considered the primary source of Joachim Du Bellay’s Deffence et Illustration de la langue françoyse, the impact of French linguistic thought on late sixteenth-century Italy is far more difficult to ascertain. In opposition to French, which quickly constructs itself as the instrument of the rising hegemonic French state, Italian, widely used around the Mediterranean as a lingua franca, does not conform to a strict nationalistic program. On all fronts a language in contact, Italian, as portrayed in the Dialogo delle lingue, must be seen in a context of a prevalent cultural heterogeneity.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Paré, F., (2025), "L'impact sur l'Italie des débats français sur la langue au milieu du XVIe siècle", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Paré, François. "L'impact sur l'Italie des débats français sur la langue au milieu du XVIe siècle." Renaissance and Reformation 39 (2): 2020. 53-63. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v39i2.8868. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.