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1861, and the number everybody quotes
The figure Peppe gestures at is one of the most cited in Italian cultural history. At unification in 1861 the proportion of the population able to use Italian has been estimated at somewhere between two and a half and ten per cent, depending on how generously you count and whose estimate you take; the much-repeated two and a half per cent comes from the linguist Tullio De Mauro and remains the figure most often quoted, though later scholarship argues for more. Everybody else spoke the language of their place. Italian was a written language with a seven-hundred-year literature and almost no native speakers, and the state that adopted it had to teach it to the country it already governed. What did the teaching was less the school than the army, internal migration, and above all television from 1954 onwards — a sequence Italians summarise exactly as Peppe does. The result is that Italian is, for a very large number of Italians over sixty, a second language learned at school, and that the dialects remain in daily use alongside it: surveys consistently find a substantial minority using dialect regularly at home. The loss is real too, and Lesson 85 comes back to it. For the learner the practical conclusion is Peppe's: the standard will serve you everywhere, and what you will hear in a bar in Naples is not it.