I recently fell into a Wikipedia rabbit hole and kinda got curious about this.
I've read that people in the area would have been speaking Ligurian/Zeneize. Would that have been among their first languages? I also read that this language is more similar in structure to French than Italian and that Italian was relatively limited this early on. Would that have translated to people speaking more French?
On a more general note, would they have likely learned Latin at this time period if they had attended a university?
Essentially I'm just wondering what the average educated member of a Genoese merchant house would have been relatively likely to be able to speak.
edit: I guess I should clarify my title - the "height" of the Genoese Republic has a few different possibilities for date ranges according to the internet. I can't edit my title, so let's maybe just pretend it says "in the Geonese Republic ~1550-1650ish" instead of mentioning anything about a "height."
Up until the advent of television, most Italians grew up speaking their local dialect. In 16th-17th century Italian cities, no one apart from the most well-educated would speak passable Italian.
The definition of "average educated person" is complicated in an age before any semblance of a public education system; the "average education" was a few years of schooling at a parochial school involving basic reading and writing skills with possibly some arithmetic, all being closely tied to catechism and religious indoctrination. These people would most definitely be exclusive speakers of the Genoese dialect. Many Genoese were sailors, and when visiting foreign ports they could if needed moderate their speech to make themselves understood in a Franco-Italian pidgin generally understood across the Mediterranean, but that's pretty much it.
As for the Genoese middle/professional class; a traveling agent of a trading house, skilled artisan, or navigator would, depending on his background, have remain at a parochial school until his mid teens and might know enough Latin to follow mass, as well as knowing which Geonese words aren't understood in the rest of Italy in addition to being expected to be able to make himself understood in French and/or Spanish. However, language skills would still principally be acquired over the course of an apprenticeship, or while climbing the career ladder, and indeed you do sometimes get lower class people rising to positions of responsibility on ships as well as in trading houses who have to resort to making themselves understood in Italo-Franco-Spanish pidgin when abroad.
On the other hand, the scion of a large trading or banking house and/or member of the aristocracy would most definitely be privately tutored in French, Spanish, and Latin although fluency would generally be determined by personal interest and necessity. Private tutors would also be expected to familiarize their students with Italian literature and poetry, with extensive study of Tuscan poets. Thus an upper-class Genoese would certainly be expected to be able to converse using "Italian" vocabulary (his accent and pronunciation, however, would depend on how well-traveled he is).
The only people going to university were upper-middle-class professionals like doctors, lawyers, and aspiring theologians. This category would most definitely be expected to know Latin as well as a passable amount of "proper" Italian.
Of course, this wasn't just the situation in Genoa. All over Italy, people spoke different languages and dialects, with only a small percentage of people in able to speak using the poetic Tuscan vocabulary that the Italian language is based on.
