What language was the Divine Comedy originally written in?

The Divine Comedy was originally written in Italian. More precisely, Dante composed it in the Florentine Tuscan vernacular, rather than in Latin, the language commonly associated with serious scholarship and theology in medieval Europe.

That choice was groundbreaking. Dante wanted a major poem about sin, redemption, politics, philosophy, and the afterlife to reach readers beyond the narrow circle trained in Latin. His literary Tuscan helped elevate the vernacular and later contributed to the development of standardized modern Italian. The poem’s language is highly crafted, using interlocking three-line stanzas known as terza rima.

A common mix-up is calling the original language simply “Tuscan” and treating that as different from Italian. Tuscan was the regional variety Dante used; “Italian” is the standard modern classification. The poem was also not originally titled The Divine Comedy: Dante called it Comedìa or Comedy, while “Divine” was added later. It was written during the early fourteenth century, broadly between about 1308 and 1321, and its influence helped make Italian one of Europe’s great literary languages.