It should be understood that Italian language's division among regional dialects has always been very pronounced. Due to the lack of a central Italian state, a standard Italian language did not actually exist until the second half of the 19th century, nor there was, until then, an agreement among scholars on this language's features. As a result, only 2.5% of Italy's population could speak the Italian standardized language properly when the nation was unified in 1861. See for example the Italian language historic evolution and M. Paul Lewis, ed. (2009). Ethnologue: Languages of the World (16th ed.). Ethnologue.com. Retrieved 2010-04-21.
