The Questione della lingua (Language question) was a debate that emerged in late medieval and Renaissance Italy concerning the nature of the linguistic practice to be adopted in the written Italian language. Literary Italian developed in various forms in the 13th and 14th centuries. Unlike English and French, its development did not follow that of a national spoken language, since this emerged only after the Unification of Italy in 1860. Thus writers mostly had to acquire a knowledge of the written language by literary imitation, instead of drawing on their native speech. It was the lack of a national spoken language on which to base the language of literature that gave rise to the protracted and controversial debate about what the standard literary language should be.