The article reconstructs the diverse phases of a 19th century linguistic controversy between the promoters of an orthographic reformation of Napolitan based on contemporary speech, and the defenders of the rules of writing, derived from the classics, pertaining to the tradition of written dialect. It also attempts to individualise the extra-linguistic reasons that influence the position of the many and varied groups opposed to one another, as well as the implications of this debate and the new perspective that it opened up both for Italian and for the dialects, once political unification had taken place.