| Sumario: | The main tendency characterizing the evolution of the vernacular in Lombardy during the late Middle Ages is the formation of a koinè. At the same time, histories of the vernacular in Lombardy have identified texts that have maintained a strong adherence to local forms of language whilst koineization was in progress. This paper considers the northern linguistic elements in the letters (1397-1402) of the Milanese merchant Giovanni da Pessano and argues that these items are best characterized by koineization. To this end, I compare Giovanni's letters with twenty-five 'dialectal' phenomena of medieval Milanese identified by Vitale (1983), and with attested phenomena of the later chancery koinè from the 1400s, to verify their presence or absence in Giovanni's letters. I suggest that the northern elements in Giovanni's letters are evidence for a more nuanced understanding of language variation in late medieval Milan than what is currently available in histories of the vernacular in Lombardy.1
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