The Italian poet Dante Alighieri, in his De vulgari eloquentia, was possibly the first European writer to argue cogently for the promotion of literature in the vernacular.
[1] Important early vernacular works include Dante's Divine Comedy, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (both in Italian), John Barbour's The Brus (in Scots), Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (in Middle English) and Jacob van Maerlant's Spieghel Historiael (in Middle Dutch).
[citation needed] The term is also applied to works not written in the standard and/or prestige language of their time and place.
During the Spanish colonial era, when Filipino did not yet exist as a national lingua franca, literature in this type flourished.
For the Egyptian dialect authors include Ahmed Fouad Negm, Muhammad Husayn Haykal, and Salah Jahin.