A while back I was on the website of one of my favorite history magazines, when I came across a very interesting article about the Italian language and its history. I did a good deal of linguistics and philology in my university years, so many of the historical considerations made were not new to me, but – I admit it – I did learn something I didn't know here and there. 

I decided to develop the topic of that article here for our readers (here's the original in Italian, entitled 10+1 Cosa che (Forse) non Sai sull'Italiano as I thought we, often, consider languages only as a means of communication and forget about all that lies behind it: their history, their evolution, the way people speak them, all things that help know an idiom closely and with a different perspective.