Lingua - questione della

This paper tries to cast Niccolò Machiavelli "Discorso o dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua" (1524?) into the framework of the debates on the Itallian language that animated the first thirty years of the XVIth century. The key-features of Machiavelli's "Discorso" (the intimate connection between mothertongue and its social milieu; the alleged 'naturalness' of language; the attention paid to the spoken language as well as its syntactic and structural characters) are summarized and both their historical relevance and theoretical originality are re-affirmed.