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In the case of Italy, I would also doubt (as you do) that a hypothetical “North Italy” would choose anything other than Italian as its official language, because the use of Italian goes back a lot further than the unification of Italy, and it’s the obvious and easy choice as a national language. The government simply doesn’t care about the regional languages dying out, and there’s no reason to think that a new North Italian government would have a different viewpoint. The main motivation, in the case of Italy, was just to have everyone speaking the same language.

However, it’s certainly possible for a country and a population to completely change language in a generation. The Italian generation of people that is now about 60 years old are effectiviely bilingual—they were taught in Italian at school, but (generally) spoke their regional language at home. The generation after that spoke only Italian, and the generation before that spoke only the regional language. (Obviously this is a bit of a generalisation.) So it’s quite straightforward for a country to change it’s language over the course of 20 years or so.

I have a colleague in the Netherlands who believes that the Netherlands will at some point adopt English as its official language. I personally doubt it, but it is nevertheless definitely possible. All it would take is for the government to decree that all schoolchildren be taught in English at school. Dutch people (and particularly Dutch school-teachers, which is the important thing) would easily be able to carry that policy out. The first generation of schoolchildren to pass through to adulthoold would probably choose to speak in English as their primary language, as has happened in Italy.

Also Brussels has changed from a Flemish speaking city to a French speaking one in a short space of time.

Your comparison of Korean to Italian isn’t helpful, because you’re confusing dialects and languages. Italy has many regional languages including Piedmontese, Lombard, Venetian, Sicilian, Sardinian, Neapolitan, etc., and of course Italian (based on the Tuscan language). Each regional language has many dialects, so for example in Piedmont you have the Turinese dialenct of Piedmontese from Turin, which is distinct from the Piedmontese dialect in other areas. The dialects vary substantially, from one village to another—even different suburbs of a city can have different words for certain things.

Confusingly, Italians would call Piedmontese or Lombard a “dialetto” as much as they would call Turinese a “dialetto”. The word basically means a dialect or regional language, depending on the context. There is also a political element to it—the Italian government has suppressed the regional languages for years, and even now does not recognise them as languages, against academic opinion.

To be clear, Italians would also (generally) refer to Welsh as a “dialetto” of English, despite the fundamental difference of Welsh and English. (In fact they would usually also often refer to the U.K. as “inghilterra”.) The word “dialetto” as currently used in normal Italian speech simply does not correspond 100% with the English word “dialect”, much like the word “camello” doesn’t correspond to “camel”.

The regional languages generally are not mutually intelligible, although this depends on which dialects two speakers speak, and how “stretto” (strong) the dialect is (I don’t know what the academic term for this is). So for example Vercellese (from Vercelli) is linguistically close to Novarese (from Novara) even though Vercellese is classed as Piedmontese and Novarese is classed as Lombard (despite being a Piedmontese city). The distinction is ultimately arbitrary—there is a gradation of dialects from Piedmontese to Lombard. Vercellese for example has many grammatical elements of Lombard (e.g. it uses the Lombard lü (meaning “he” or “him”) instead of the Piedmontese chiela).

Also, an older or more rustic speaker is more likely to speak a “stretto” dialect, because they’ll use more words and expressions originally belonging to that dialect (or to the regional language). Over the years, the regional languages have absorbed many words from Italian, replacing the traditional words. Now, the same thing is happening to Italian with English words (e.g. the word “goal” replacing “rete”, or “babysitter” replacing “tata”, or “shopping” replacing “spesa”—the English word in each case sounds more modern or cool to Italian speakers).

The linguistic situation is basically the same as with Catalan and Spanish. Catalan is as much a “dialect” of Spanish as Piedmontese would be a “dialect” of Italian. In fact, you could just as rightfully say that Italian is a “dialect” of Piedmontese. The difference is political, not academic.

TL;DW for The System (courtesy of Wikipedia):

The System, a Channel 4 special in which Brown shared his "100 percent guaranteed" method for winning on the horses, was first shown on 1 February 2008.

The show was based around the idea that a system could be developed to "guarantee a winner" of horse races. Cameras followed a member of the public, Khadisha, as Brown anonymously sent her correct predictions of five races in a row, before encouraging her to place as much money as she could on the sixth race. To demonstrate the system to the viewer, Brown tossed a coin showing ten heads in a row to prove it was not impossible, just highly improbable.

After Brown had placed a bet of £4,000 of Khadisha's money on a horse in the final race, he explained that "The System" did not really exist. He had started by contacting 7,776 people and split them into six groups, giving each group a different horse. As each race had taken place 5⁄6 of the people had lost and were dropped from the system. Brown had a different person backing each horse in each race, and one individual, Khadisha, won five times in a row. This was similar to the coin flipping earlier: rather than having a predictive technique, Brown had tossed a coin repeatedly until ten heads had come up in a row, taking over nine hours to produce the required film. Brown expressed the opinion that the principle behind "The System" (essentially confirmation bias or survivorship bias) is what is behind belief in spiritualism or homoeopathic and alternative medicine.

After the selected horse in the final race lost, and Khadisha was convinced that she had lost all her borrowed money, Brown told Khadisha to look again at the betting slip in her hand. The ticket showed the winning horse's name, meaning Khadisha kept her stake and received winnings of £13,000. Brown claimed that he had decided to bet on a different horse when he got to the booth.

At the end of the show, a title card explained that "at each stage of the process, participants who did not make it to the next round were offered a complete refund of any bets they had placed."

This is one reason why I never plan to even visit the U.S.

Yahoo’s implementation of this (Sign In Seals) works with a Flash (LSO) Cookie. So, they remember your username (and your personalized picture / seal) by inspecting the Flash cookie. I remember the first time I tried it—and being impressed—but then wondering how the fuck they did it. Then being less impressed when I realized that it doesn’t work after clearing your Flash cookies (or if you have Flash turned off).