I.

Introduction

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.