Who is considered the father of the modern Italian language?

Dante Alighieri is considered the father of the modern Italian language. His most influential work, the Divine Comedy, was written primarily in the Florentine vernacular rather than in Latin, helping establish Tuscan as the foundation of literary Italian.

Dante lived from about 1265 to 1321, when the Italian peninsula was divided among city-states and used many regional varieties of Romance speech. Latin remained the dominant language of scholarship and formal writing. By creating an ambitious philosophical and religious poem in a vernacular, Dante demonstrated that everyday Italian could express complex ideas and elevated literary art.

Dante was not the only writer who shaped Italian. Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio also became major models, and later scholars and writers helped standardize the language. Political unification in 1861 accelerated the spread of a common national language.

The title is therefore a recognition of influence, not a claim that Dante single-handedly invented Italian. His Florentine-based language became the prestigious literary model that strongly shaped modern standard Italian.