The matter is controversial, as the island was historically and culturally bound to the Italian Mainland from the Middle Ages until the 19th century, and installed in a diglossic system where both Corsican and Italian were perceived as two sociolinguistic levels of the same language; Corsican and Italian traditionally existed on a spectrum, whose proximity line was blurred enough that the locals needed little else but a change of register to communicate with the standard Italian-speaking elites and administration. "Tuscanising" their tongue allowed for a practice of code-mixing typical of the Mainland Italian dialects.