Gallo-Italic

The Gallo-Italic languages, with Venetian often added to the group, descend from the Vulgar Latin of Cisalpine Gaul, with a Celtic substrate and a Lombardic superstrate left by the Lombard invasions of the sixth century. Gallo-Italic colonies planted after the Norman conquest of Sicily around 1100 survive as language islands in Sicily and Basilicata.

The vernaculars long served local administration, but from the fifteenth century literary Tuscan, championed by humanists such as Pietro Bembo, displaced them from writing, a trend encouraged at the Sforza court of Ludovico il Moro in Milan.

Local literature nonetheless endured: Carlo Maria Maggi standardized Milanese spelling in the seventeenth century and created the stage mask Meneghino, while in Venice Ruzante, Goldoni and Gozzi made Venetian the voice of comedy and the republic made it a Mediterranean lingua franca.