Breve storia della lingua italiana dal latino a oggi

What does “volgare” mean in Italian language history?

When Italians call early Italian the volgare, they don’t mean crude. The word comes from the Latin vulgus, “the common people,” so il volgare is simply the spoken Latin of ordinary folk — as opposed to the polished Latin of Cicero. That popular speech slowly drifted into the Romance languages. So volgare here means “of the people,” not coarse — even though it shares its root with English “vulgar,” and it’s the direct ancestor of the Italian you’re learning.

Italy had many regional volgari, but the Tuscan — specifically Florentine — version won out, carried by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, who enriched it with learned words. Florence’s medieval prestige made fiorentino the literary standard, chosen again as the national language at unification in 1861. The same vulgus root gives English “vulgar,” which kept the negative drift Italian’s volgare never fully took.