Italian Language

Italian Language, one of the Romance group of languages, a subgroup of the Italic languages of the Indo-European language family. Italian is spoken by around 61,490,000 people, principally in the Italian peninsula (55 million) but also in 29 other countries including southern Switzerland, San Marino, the Vatican State, Croatia, Slovenia, Canada, and parts of South America. Often considered a language with numerous dialects (many of which are regarded as separate languages), Italian, like the other Romance languages, is the direct offspring of the Latin spoken by the Romans and imposed by them on the peoples under their dominion. Of all the major Romance languages, Italian retains the closest resemblance to Latin. The struggle between the written but dead language and the various forms of the living speech, most of which were derived from Vulgar Latin, was nowhere so intense or so protracted as in Italy.

During the long period of the evolution of Italian, many dialects developed out of Vulgar Latin. Today, some of these dialects are no longer mutually intelligible and have their own dialectal divisions; they are therefore languages in their own right. The Italian languages and dialects form two subsets (Gallo-Italian and Italo-Dalmatian) of the Italo-Western group of languages, one of the three sub-groups of the Romance languages. Corsican and the different varieties of the Sardinian language (spoken in Corsica and Sardinia respectively) form a separate group from Italian, the Southern sub-group of Romance languages. In the north and north-west of Italy the Gallo-Italian dialects predominate; they are Piemontese, Lombard, Venetian, Emiliano-Romagnolo, and Ligurian; they all display similar characteristics to French and Occitan. All are very different from Standard Italian, particularly Lombard, Emiliano-Romagnolo, and Piemontese; the latter of which has been greatly influenced by French. The Venetian language is spoken in Croatia and Slovenia, in addition to the Venetia area itself. South of these districts some of the Italo-Dalmatian languages are found; these are Judaeo-Italian (a Jewish language), Sicilian (spoken in Sicily), Napoletano-Calabrese (including the Neapolitan dialect), and the dialects of Italian proper, including Tuscan, Umbrian, and Molisano. Most speakers of regional Italian languages are bilingual in Standard Italian, using their local dialect for informal situations, and the standard for formal purposes. The standard literary language was taken from the Florentine dialect. The language of the eastern Alps, Friulian, which is spoken in north-eastern Venetia, is a Rhaeto-Romanic language in a different subset of the Romance languages to all of the above languages. Also in this Rhaetian subset is Ladin, spoken in the Dolomites and in Trentino-Alto Adige, near the South Tyrol region.

The multiplicity of these languages and dialects and their individual claims upon their native speakers as pure Italian speech presented a peculiar difficulty in the evolution of an accepted form of Italian that would reflect the cultural unity of the entire peninsula. Even the earliest popular Italian documents, produced in the 10th century, are dialectal in language, and during the following three centuries Italian writers wrote in their native dialects, producing a number of competing regional schools of literature. During the 14th century the Tuscan dialect began to predominate, because of the central position of Tuscany in Italy, and because of the aggressive commerce of its most important city, Florence. Moreover, of all the Italian dialects, Tuscan departs least in morphology and phonology from classical Latin, and it therefore harmonizes best with the Italian traditions of Latin culture. Finally, Florentine culture produced the three literary artists who best summarized Italian thought and feeling of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.

Grammarians during the 15th and the 16th centuries attempted to confer upon the pronunciation, syntax, and vocabulary of 14th-century Tuscan the status of a central and classical Italian speech. Eventually this classicism, which might have made Italian another dead language, was widened to include the organic changes inevitable in a living tongue. In the dictionaries and publications of the Accademia della Crusca, founded in 1583, which have been accepted by Italians as authoritative in Italian linguistic matters, compromises between classical purism and living Tuscan usage have been successfully effected.

In modern Standard Italian the Latin qualities of the Florentine dialect are preserved, but the vocabulary of Latin has been made to meet the changing conditions of Italian life. The simplicity of the phonetic changes from Latin, along with an almost perfectly phonetic orthography, makes learning Italian easy for a person who knows Latin or any of its modern Romance forms. The most notable difference between Italian and French or Spanish is that plurals are formed not with -s or -es but with -e for most feminine nouns and -i for masculine words.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.