[imbnwa]

I mean, Southern Italians from Calabria and Sicily fled Italy precisely to escape what they perceived as an attack on their culture and society by Northern Italy, given the official government told everybody "you and your children will now be speaking Tuscan from now on, oh, and we're gonna fuck you with high taxes" (Tuscan, the regional language of Tuscany, was promoted to Official Italian by the Nationalist government). This schism between north and south still exists to this day in Italy (it even gets mentioned in The Sopranos!).

Perhaps the difference is one of degree rather than an absolute difference