The histoty of language in the history of schools: post-unification Italian in pupils' compositions

The role played by the Italian school in the diffusion of the national language in the different dialectological areas of the peninsula and in a wider range of social classes was crucial in the first century after the unification. School exercise books provide a fundamental testimonial of the different phases that have characterised this process, which took place thanks to manuals inspired by a variety of Italian language that was totally detached from the concrete experience of the speakers on the one hand, and through teaching methods derived from the teaching of foreign languages, on the other. Pupils' writing in exercise books can testify to both the different linguistic models adopted and the dialectal specificities synchronically present in the country. The linguistic material obtained' from school exercise books is heterogeneous and requires - at least for the specific sociolinguistic complexity which characterises the Italian language - availability of representative corpora on more than one level, as well as the application of a specific methodology.