The reason why we see French or Italian as a unified language spoken more or less equally in large geographical areas is due to the influence of the states.
As someone living in a city it’s often easy to overrate how unified languages actually get spoken in villages. I have heard stories from Italy where a few villages speak a dialect that’s not understandable to people who aren’t very far away.
I heard stories from a village in Bavaria in Germany where it’s custom for the people in the village to invent a lot of words that aren’t understood by neighboring villages.
Italy is an interesting case because there are in fact many thriving languages (Sicilian, Piemontese, Venetian, Napolitan, and a long etc) but most Italians themselves are not very aware of this and don’t call them languages but dialects (I know the definition is blurry, but I think it is easy to argue that they are different enough among them to be called fully-fledged languages). What we call Italian is actually the language that was spoken in Florence and became recently the common language for all Italians. In Spain there is a different situation: Valencian and Catalan and technically the same language, but they are recognized as different languages in the Spanish Consitution mostly for political reasons.
As someone living in a city it’s often easy to overrate how unified languages actually get spoken in villages. I have heard stories from Italy where a few villages speak a dialect that’s not understandable to people who aren’t very far away.
I heard stories from a village in Bavaria in Germany where it’s custom for the people in the village to invent a lot of words that aren’t understood by neighboring villages.
Italy is an interesting case because there are in fact many thriving languages (Sicilian, Piemontese, Venetian, Napolitan, and a long etc) but most Italians themselves are not very aware of this and don’t call them languages but dialects (I know the definition is blurry, but I think it is easy to argue that they are different enough among them to be called fully-fledged languages). What we call Italian is actually the language that was spoken in Florence and became recently the common language for all Italians. In Spain there is a different situation: Valencian and Catalan and technically the same language, but they are recognized as different languages in the Spanish Consitution mostly for political reasons.