The Florentine dialect or vernacular ( or ) is a variety of Tuscan, a

Romance language The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...

spoken in the Italian city of

Florence Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico ...

and its immediate surroundings. A received pedagogical variant derived from it historically, once called (literally, 'the amended Florentine pronunciation').

Literature

Important writers such as

Dante Alighieri Dante Alighieri (; – 14 September 1321), probably baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. His '' Divine Comedy'', originally called (modern Italian: ...

Francesco Petrarch Francesco Petrarca (; 20 July 1304 – 18/19 July 1374), commonly anglicized as Petrarch (), was a scholar and poet of early Renaissance Italy, and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited w ...

Giovanni Boccaccio Giovanni Boccaccio (, , ; 16 June 1313 – 21 December 1375) was an Italian writer, poet, correspondent of Petrarch, and an important Renaissance humanist. Born in the town of Certaldo, he became so well known as a writer that he was som ...

and, later,

Niccolò Machiavelli Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli ( , , ; 3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527), occasionally rendered in English as Nicholas Machiavel ( , ; see below), was an Italian diplomat, author, philosopher and historian who lived during the Renaissance. ...

and

Francesco Guicciardini Francesco Guicciardini (; 6 March 1483 – 22 May 1540) was an Italian historian and statesman. A friend and critic of Niccolò Machiavelli, he is considered one of the major political writers of the Italian Renaissance. In his masterpiece, ''T ...

wrote in literary Tuscan/Florentine, perhaps the best-known example being Dante's ''

Divine Comedy The ''Divine Comedy'' ( it, Divina Commedia ) is an Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun 1308 and completed in around 1321, shortly before the author's death. It is widely considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature a ...

''.

Differences from Standard Italian

Florentine, and Tuscan more generally, can be distinguished from Standard Italian by differences in numerous features at all levels:

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

, morphology,

syntax In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituenc ...

and

lexicon A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word (), neuter of () meaning 'of or fo ...

. Perhaps the difference most noticed by Italians and foreigners alike is known as the ''

gorgia toscana The Tuscan gorgia ( it, gorgia toscana , ; "Tuscan throat") is a phonetic phenomenon governed by a complex of allophonic rules characteristic of the Tuscan dialects, in Tuscany, Italy, especially the central ones, with Florence traditionally view ...

'' (literally 'Tuscan throat'), a consonant-weakening rule widespread in Tuscany in which the

voiceless plosive In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lips ...

phonemes , , are pronounced between vowels as

fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...

s , , respectively. The sequence ''la casa'' 'the house', for example, is pronounced , and ''buco'' 'hole' is realized as . Preceded by a pause or a consonant, is produced as (as in the word ''casa'' alone or in the phrase ''in casa''). Similar alternations obtain for → , and → ,. Strengthening to a

geminate consonant In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct fr ...

occurs when the preceding word triggers

syntactic doubling Syntactic gemination, or syntactic doubling, is an external sandhi phenomenon in Italian, other Romance languages spoken in Italy, and Finnish. It consists in the lengthening (gemination) of the initial consonant in certain contexts. It may also ...

(''raddoppiamento fonosintattico'') so the initial consonant of ''pipa'' 'pipe (for smoking)' has three phonetic forms: in spoken as a single word or following a consonant, if preceded by a vowel as in ''la pipa'' 'the pipe' and (also transcribed ) in ''tre pipe'' 'three pipes'. Parallel alternations of the affricates and are also typical of Florentine but by no means confined to it or even to Tuscan. The word ''gelato'' is pronounced with following a pause or a consonant, following a vowel and if ''raddoppiamento'' applies (, ''un gelato'', ''quattro gelati'', ''tre gelati''. Similarly, the initial consonant of ''cena'' 'dinner' has three phonetic forms, , and . In both cases, the weakest variant appears between vowels ( ''regione'' 'region', ''quattro gelati''; ''la cena'', ''bacio'' 'kiss'). Examples: (Florentine dialect, standard Italian, English): * Io sòn = io sono = I am * Te tu sei = tu sei = you are * Egli l'è = egli è = he/she/it is * Noi s'è/semo = noi siamo = we are * Voi vù siete = voi siete = you are * Essi l'enno = essi sono = they are * Io c'ho = io ho = I have * Te tu c'hai = te hai = you have * Egli c'ha = egli ha = he/she/it has * Noi ci s'ha = noi abbiamo = we have * Voi vù c'avete = voi avete = you have * Essi c'hanno = essi hanno = they have vohabolario del Vernacolo fiorentino e del dialetto Toscano di ieri e di oggi

References

* *Giacomelli, Gabriella. 1975. Dialettologia toscana. ''Archivio glottologico italiano'' 60, pp. 179-191. *Giannelli, Luciano. 2000. ''Toscana''. (Profilo dei dialetti italiani, 9). Pisa: Pacini. Florence {{romance-lang-stub