IV.

Modern Italian

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.