Lingua d’uso popolare in una grammatica pistoiese di fine Ottocento

Pratica della grammatica per le scuole elementari del circondario pistoiese (Practice of the grammar for the elementary schools of Pistoia district) is a school textbook which, published anonymously in 1887, is dedicated to correcting the most common errors, mainly of popular level, in the Italian spoken in the area of Pistoia in the late Nineteenth Century. It presents itself as a series of exercises including a variety of dialectal and popular uses and constructs that, according to the author, were collected from Pistoiese people’s live voice and the tasks of pupils. As other analogous contemporary works, this book is a remarkable historical testimony, in this case of the Pistoia reality. This article, after describing this grammar and placing it in the historical context in which saw the light, proposes a linguistic analysis of the most notable phenomena re corded in the work.