Neapolitan—is it a language or a dialect?  Who speaks it and where? Also, when should one speak Italian and when should one speak in dialect? Italy, as a state, is a relatively new and rather miraculous invention.  Against all geopolitical odds (European Statesmen Count Metternich once called Italy nothing more than a geographic expression), the Italian Republic was born in 1871 after several nation states unified to form what we now call Italy.

It took almost 100 years for Italian to even begin to become the predominate language spoken in households and streets, mostly thanks to the invention of television and the national network RAI.  Lord help us all in the age of the internet—perhaps we will all be speaking in hashtags and emojis in the not so distant future.