Romance Dialectology in France and Italy in the 1870s, or the Ethnic Question through the Lens of Linguistics

It is widely accepted that nineteenth-century Romance linguistics—and historical-comparative linguistics in general—took no particular interest in the relationship between language and race, which was considered to lie beyond the scope of the discipline. Even so, the debate on race and ethnicity was not completely absent from the field, resurfacing in particular in the study of dialects. Dialects were, in fact, considered vestiges of ancient ethnic groups, and the great difference between them was accounted for by the variety of primitive languages and tribal lineages. By outlining the development the development of Romance dialectology in France and Italy in the 1870s, this contribution aims to analyze how the ethnic question was transposed to the linguistic one, as well as the different reception that was accorded to the study of dialects in these two countries.