Italian Nationalist Ideology and the Inconsistent Classification of Gallo-“Italic” Contested Languages

Genealogical, dialectometric, and intelligibility studies unanimously describe Gallo“Italic” as closer to GalloRomance than to ItaloRomance. Nonetheless, a significant body of scholarship refers to Gallo“Italic” as part of ItaloRomance (proItalotradition). Recent research has identified several formal inconsistencies in these proItaloclassifications, which suggest that the inclination for the proItalomodels among linguists could have extralinguistic motivations. This paper argues that referring to Gallo“Italic” as part of ItaloRomance has the effect of representing Italy as an ethnolinguistic taxon – a concept historically perceived as essential to the Italian nationbuilding process. By adopting the hypothesis of ideological interference from a monoethnolinguistic framework, this study provides an economical explanation for various classificatory inconsistencies found in the literature. These include the incongruous use of nomenclature forms, the use of the questionable “bridge variety” category, and the arbitrarily decisive classificatory weight assigned to the loss of final s. The study suggests that the proItaloterminological and classificatory choices may obscure the deep ethnolinguistic diversity of Italy, potentially preventing speakers from developing awareness that, rather than “Italian dialects” – as Italian academia and institutions call them – they speak distinct languages deserving, as such, of institutional recognition and support. Furthermore, it is proposed that the prevalence of these views is partly sustained by the structural position of linguistics within Italian university curricula, particularly within literaturebased Bachelor of Arts programmes. The paper concludes by advocating for the development of alternative channels for disseminating knowledge of linguistic sciences other than the university courses in literature, to foster a more nuanced understanding of Italy’s linguistic heritage.