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Italian (''italiano'' or ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin of the
Roman Empire The Roman Empire ( la, Imperium Romanum ; grc-gre, Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Basileía tôn Rhōmaíōn) was the post-Roman Republic, Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity, it included large territorial holdings aro ...
. Together with Sardinian, Italian is the least divergent language from
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
. Spoken by about 85 million people (2022), Italian is an official language in
Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...
,
Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...
( Ticino and the Grisons), San Marino, and
Vatican City Vatican City (), officially the Vatican City State ( it, Stato della Città del Vaticano; la, Status Civitatis Vaticanae),—' * german: Vatikanstadt, cf. '—' (in Austria: ') * pl, Miasto Watykańskie, cf. '—' * pt, Cidade do Vati ...
. It has an official minority status in western Istria ( Croatia and Slovenia). Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and
Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. With an area of , Australia is the largest country by ...
.Ethnologue report for language code:ita (Italy)
– Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Online version
Italian is included under the languages covered by the
European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML) is a European treaty (CETS 148) adopted in 1992 under the auspices of the Council of Europe to protect and promote historical regional and minority languages in Europe. However, th ...
in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in
Romania Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern, and Southeast Europe, Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, S ...
, although Italian is neither a co-official nor a protected language in these countries. Many speakers of Italian are native bilinguals of both Italian (either in its standard form or regional varieties) and another regional language of Italy. Italian is a major language in Europe, being one of the official languages of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and one of the working languages of the Council of Europe. It is the second-most-widely spoken native language in the European Union with 67 million speakers (15% of the EU population) and it is spoken as a second language by 13.4 million EU citizens (3%).Europeans and their Languages

Data for EU27
published in 2012.
Including Italian speakers in non-EU European countries (such as Switzerland, Albania and the
United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and ...
) and on other continents, the total number of speakers is approximately 85 million. Italian is the main working language of the Holy See, serving as the lingua franca (common language) in the Roman Catholic hierarchy as well as the official language of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Italian has a significant use in musical terminology and opera with numerous Italian words referring to music that have become international terms taken into various languages worldwide. Italian was adopted by the state after the Unification of Italy, having previously been a literary language based on Tuscan as spoken mostly by the upper class of Florentine society. Almost all native Italian words end with vowels and has a 7-vowel sound system ('e' and 'o' have mid-low and mid-high sounds). Italian has contrast between short and long consonants and gemination (doubling) of consonants.


History


Origins

During the Middle Ages, the established written language in Europe was Latin, though the great majority of people were illiterate, and only a handful were well versed in the language. In the Italian Peninsula, as in most of Europe, most would instead speak a local vernacular. These dialects, as they are commonly referred to, evolved from Vulgar Latin over the course of centuries, unaffected by formal standards and teachings. They are not in any sense "dialects" of standard Italian, which itself started off as one of these local tongues, but sister languages of Italian.
Mutual intelligibility In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as ...
with Italian varies widely, as it does with Romance languages in general. The Romance languages of Italy can differ greatly from Italian at all levels ( phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, pragmatics) and are classified typologically as distinct languages. The standard Italian language has a poetic and literary origin in the writings of Tuscan and Sicilian writers of the 12th century, and, even though the grammar and core lexicon are basically unchanged from those used in Florence in the 13th century, the modern standard of the language was largely shaped by relatively recent events. However, Romance vernacular as language spoken in the Italian Peninsula has a longer history. In fact, the earliest surviving texts that can definitely be called vernacular (as distinct from its predecessor Vulgar Latin) are legal formulae known as the Placiti Cassinesi from the Province of Benevento that date from 960 to 963, although the Veronese Riddle, probably from the 8th or early 9th century, contains a late form of Vulgar Latin that can be seen as a very early sample of a vernacular dialect of Italy. The
Commodilla catacomb inscription The Commodilla catacomb inscription is found on the cornice of a fresco in the tomb of the Christian martyrs Felix and Adauctus, located in the catacombs of Commodilla in Rome. The graffito has an important place in the history of Italian, as i ...
is also a similar case. The Italian language has progressed through a long and slow process, which started after the Western Roman Empire's fall in the 5th century. The language that came to be thought of as Italian developed in central Tuscany and was first formalized in the early 14th century through the works of Tuscan writer Dante Alighieri, written in his native Florentine. Dante's epic poems, known collectively as the ', to which another Tuscan poet Giovanni Boccaccio later affixed the title ', were read throughout the peninsula and his written dialect became the "canonical standard" that all educated Italians could understand. Dante is still credited with standardizing the Italian language. In addition to the widespread exposure gained through literature, the Florentine dialect also gained prestige due to the political and cultural significance of Florence at the time and the fact that it was linguistically an intermediate between the northern and the southern Italian dialects. Thus the dialect 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 ...
became the basis for what would become the official language of Italy. Italian was progressively made an official language of most of the Italian states predating unification, slowly replacing Latin, even when ruled by foreign powers (like Spain in the Kingdom of Naples, or Austria in the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia), even though the masses kept speaking primarily their local vernaculars. Italian was also one of the many recognised languages in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Italy has always had a distinctive dialect for each city because the cities, until recently, were thought of as city-states. Those dialects now have considerable variety. As Tuscan-derived Italian came to be used throughout Italy, features of local speech were naturally adopted, producing various versions of Regional Italian. The most characteristic differences, for instance, between
Roman Roman or Romans most often refers to: * Rome, the capital city of Italy * Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *''Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a lett ...
Italian and Milanese Italian are syntactic gemination of initial consonants in some contexts and the pronunciation of stressed "e", and of "s" between vowels in many words: e.g. ' "all right" is pronounced by a Roman (and by any standard Italian speaker), by a Milanese (and by any speaker whose native dialect lies to the north of the La Spezia–Rimini Line); ' "at home" is for Roman, or for standard, for Milanese and generally northern. In contrast to the Gallo-Italic linguistic panorama of Northern Italy, the
Italo-Dalmatian The Italo-Dalmatian languages, or Central Romance languages, are a group of Romance languages spoken in Italy, Corsica (France), and formerly in Dalmatia (Croatia). Italo-Dalmatian can be split into:Hammarström, Harald & Forkel, Robert & Haspe ...
,
Neapolitan Neapolitan means of or pertaining to Naples, a city in Italy; or to: Geography and history * Province of Naples, a province in the Campania region of southern Italy that includes the city * Duchy of Naples, in existence during the Early and Hig ...
and its related dialects were largely unaffected by the Franco- Occitan influences introduced to Italy mainly by bards from France during the Middle Ages, but after the Norman conquest of southern Italy, Sicily became the first Italian land to adopt Occitan lyric moods (and words) in poetry. Even in the case of Northern Italian languages, however, scholars are careful not to overstate the effects of outsiders on the natural indigenous developments of the languages. The economic might and relatively advanced development of Tuscany at the time ( Late Middle Ages) gave its language weight, though
Venetian Venetian often means from or related to: * Venice, a city in Italy * Veneto, a region of Italy * Republic of Venice (697–1797), a historical nation in that area Venetian and the like may also refer to: * Venetian language, a Romance language s ...
remained widespread in medieval Italian commercial life, and Ligurian (or Genoese) remained in use in maritime trade alongside the Mediterranean. The increasing political and cultural relevance of Florence during the periods of the rise of the Medici Bank, humanism, and the Renaissance made its dialect, or rather a refined version of it, a standard in the arts.


Renaissance

The Renaissance era, known as in Italian, was seen as a time of rebirth, which is the literal meaning of both (from French) and (Italian). During this time, long-existing beliefs stemming from the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church began to be understood from new perspectives as
humanists Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential and agency of human beings. It considers human beings the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry. The meaning of the term "human ...
—individuals who placed emphasis on the human body and its full potential—began to shift focus from the church to human beings themselves. The continual advancements in technology play a crucial role in the diffusion of languages. After the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, the number of printing presses in Italy grew rapidly and by the year 1500 reached a total of 56, the biggest number of printing presses in all of Europe. This enabled the production of more pieces of literature at a lower cost and as the dominant language, Italian, spread. Italian became the language used in the courts of every state in the Italian Peninsula, as well as the prestige variety used on the island of Corsica (but not in the neighboring Sardinia, which on the contrary underwent Italianization well into the late 18th century, under Savoyard sway: the island's linguistic composition, roofed by the prestige of Spanish among the Sardinians, would therein make for a rather slow process of
assimilation Assimilation may refer to: Culture * Cultural assimilation, the process whereby a minority group gradually adapts to the customs and attitudes of the prevailing culture and customs ** Language shift, also known as language assimilation, the prog ...
to the Italian cultural sphere). The rediscovery of Dante's , as well as a renewed interest in linguistics in the 16th century, sparked a debate that raged throughout Italy concerning the criteria that should govern the establishment of a modern Italian literary and spoken language. This discussion, known as (i. e., the ''problem of the language''), ran through the Italian culture until the end of the 19th century, often linked to the political debate on achieving a united Italian state. Renaissance scholars divided into three main factions: * The purists, headed by Venetian Pietro Bembo (who, in his , claimed the language might be based only on the great literary classics, such as Petrarch and some part of Boccaccio). The purists thought the ''Divine Comedy'' was not dignified enough because it used elements from non-lyric registers of the language. * Niccolò Machiavelli and other Florentines preferred the version spoken by ordinary people in their own times. * The courtiers, like
Baldassare Castiglione Baldassare Castiglione, Count of Casatico (; 6 December 1478 – 2 February 1529),Dates of birth and death, and cause of the latter, fro, ''Italica'', Rai International online. was an Italian courtier, diplomat, soldier and a prominent Renaissanc ...
and Gian Giorgio Trissino, insisted that each local vernacular contribute to the new standard. A fourth faction claimed that the best Italian was the one that the papal court adopted, which was a mixture of the Tuscan and
Roman Roman or Romans most often refers to: * Rome, the capital city of Italy * Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *''Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a lett ...
dialects. Eventually, Bembo's ideas prevailed, and the foundation of the in Florence (1582–1583), the official legislative body of the Italian language, led to publication of
Agnolo Monosini Agnolo Monosini (Pratovecchio 1568 – Florence 1626) was an Italian scholar and cleric of the 16th and 17th centuries, who played a key role in the development of the Italian language two hundred years prior to the risorgimento. He was a native o ...
's Latin tome in 1604 followed by the first Italian dictionary in 1612.


Modern era

An important event that helped the diffusion of Italian was the conquest and occupation of Italy by Napoleon in the early 19th century (who was himself of Italian-Corsican descent). This conquest propelled the unification of Italy some decades after and pushed the Italian language into a lingua franca used not only among clerks, nobility, and functionaries in the Italian courts but also by the bourgeoisie.


Contemporary times

Italian literature's first modern novel, ('' The Betrothed'') by Alessandro Manzoni, further defined the standard by "rinsing" his Milanese "in the waters of the
Arno The Arno is a river in the Tuscany region of Italy. It is the most important river of central Italy after the Tiber. Source and route The river originates on Monte Falterona in the Casentino area of the Apennines, and initially takes a ...
" (
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 ...
's river), as he states in the preface to his 1840 edition. After unification, a huge number of civil servants and soldiers recruited from all over the country introduced many more words and idioms from their home languages— is derived from the
Venetian Venetian often means from or related to: * Venice, a city in Italy * Veneto, a region of Italy * Republic of Venice (697–1797), a historical nation in that area Venetian and the like may also refer to: * Venetian language, a Romance language s ...
word ("slave", that is "your servant"), comes from the Lombard word , etc. Only 2.5% of Italy's population could speak the Italian standardized language properly when the nation was unified in 1861.


Classification

Italian is a Romance language, a descendant of Vulgar Latin (colloquial spoken Latin). Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, especially its Florentine dialect, and is therefore an Italo-Dalmatian language, a classification that includes most other central and southern Italian languages and the extinct Dalmatian. According to many sources, Italian is the closest language to
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
in terms of vocabulary. According to the Ethnologue,
lexical similarity In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 1 (or 100%) would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words. ...
is 89% with French, 87% with
Catalan Catalan may refer to: Catalonia From, or related to Catalonia: * Catalan language, a Romance language * Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia Places * 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...
, 85% with Sardinian, 82% with Spanish, 80% with Portuguese, 78% with
Ladin Ladin may refer to: *Ladin language, a language in northern Italy, often classified as a Rhaeto-Romance language *Ladin people, the inhabitants of the Dolomite Alps region of northern Italy See also *Laden (disambiguation) *Ladino (disambiguati ...
, 77% with
Romanian Romanian may refer to: *anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania ** Romanians, an ethnic group **Romanian language, a Romance language ***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language **Romanian cuisine, traditiona ...
. Estimates may differ according to sources. One study (analyzing the degree of differentiation of Romance languages in comparison to Latin (comparing phonology, inflection, discourse, syntax, vocabulary, and intonation) estimated that distance between Italian and Latin is higher than that between Sardinian and Latin. In particular, its vowels are the second-closest to Latin after Sardinian. As in most Romance languages, stress is distinctive.


Geographic distribution

Italian is an official language of Italy and San Marino and is spoken fluently by the majority of the countries' populations. Italian is the third most spoken language in
Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...
(after German and French), though its use there has moderately declined since the 1970s. It is official both on the national level and on regional level in two cantons: Ticino and the Grisons. In the latter canton, however, it is only spoken by a small minority, in the Italian Grisons. Ticino, which includes Lugano, the largest Italian-speaking city outside Italy, is the only canton where Italian is predominant. Italian is also used in administration and official documents in
Vatican City Vatican City (), officially the Vatican City State ( it, Stato della Città del Vaticano; la, Status Civitatis Vaticanae),—' * german: Vatikanstadt, cf. '—' (in Austria: ') * pl, Miasto Watykańskie, cf. '—' * pt, Cidade do Vati ...
. Italian is also spoken by a minority in Monaco and France, especially in the southeastern part of the country. Italian was the official language in Savoy and in Nice until 1860, when they were both annexed by France under the Treaty of Turin, a development that triggered the "
Niçard exodus The Niçard exodus ( it, esodo nizzardo ; ) was one of the first emigration phenomena that involved the Italian populations in the contemporary age. It was due to the refusal of a quarter of the Niçard Italians to stay in Nice after its ann ...
", the emigration of a quarter of the Niçard Italians to Italy. Italian was the official language of Corsica until 1859. Italian is generally understood in Corsica by the population resident therein who speak Corsican, which is an Italo-Romance idiom similar to Tuscan. Italian was the official language in Monaco until 1860, when it was replaced by the French. This was due to the annexation of the surrounding County of Nice to France following the
Treaty of Turin (1860) The Treaty of Turin ( it, Trattato di Torino; french: Traité de Turin) concluded between France and Piedmont-Sardinia on 24 March 1860 is the instrument by which the region of Savoy and the County of Nice were annexed to France, ending the ce ...
. It formerly had official status in Montenegro (because of the Venetian Albania), parts of Slovenia and Croatia (because of the Venetian Istria and Venetian Dalmatia), parts of Greece (because of the Venetian rule in the Ionian Islands and by the Kingdom of Italy in the Dodecanese). Italian is widely spoken in
Malta Malta ( , , ), officially the Republic of Malta ( mt, Repubblika ta' Malta ), is an island country in the Mediterranean Sea. It consists of an archipelago, between Italy and Libya, and is often considered a part of Southern Europe. It lies ...
, where nearly two-thirds of the population can speak it fluently. Italian served as Malta's official language until 1934, when it was abolished by the British colonial administration amid strong local opposition. Italian language in Slovenia is an officially recognized
minority language A minority language is a language spoken by a minority of the population of a territory. Such people are termed linguistic minorities or language minorities. With a total number of 196 sovereign states recognized internationally (as of 2019) ...
in the country. The official census, carried out in 2002, reported 2,258 ethnic Italians ( Istrian Italians) in Slovenia (0.11% of the total population). Italian language in Croatia is an official minority language in the country, with many schools and public announcements published in both languages. The 2001 census in Croatia reported 19,636 ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians) in the country (some 0.42% of the total population). Their numbers dropped dramatically after
World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...
following the
Istrian–Dalmatian exodus The Istrian–Dalmatian exodus (; ; ) was the post- World War II exodus and departure of local ethnic Italians ( Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians) as well as ethnic Slovenes, Croats, and Istro-Romanians from the Yugoslav territory of ...
, which caused the emigration of between 230,000 and 350,000 Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians. Italian was the official language of the
Republic of Ragusa The Republic of Ragusa ( dlm, Republica de Ragusa; la, Respublica Ragusina; it, Repubblica di Ragusa; hr, Dubrovačka Republika; vec, Repùblega de Raguxa) was an aristocratic maritime republic centered on the city of Dubrovnik (''Ragusa'' ...
from 1492 to 1807. It formerly had official status in
Albania Albania ( ; sq, Shqipëri or ), or , also or . officially the Republic of Albania ( sq, Republika e Shqipërisë), is a country in Southeastern Europe. It is located on the Adriatic and Ionian Seas within the Mediterranean Sea and share ...
due to the annexation of the country to the Kingdom of Italy (1939–1943). Albania has a large population of non-native speakers, with over half of the population having some knowledge of the Italian language. The Albanian government has pushed to make Italian a compulsory second language in schools. The Italian language is well-known and studied in Albania, due to its historical ties and geographical proximity to Italy and to the diffusion of Italian television in the country. Due to heavy Italian influence during the Italian colonial period, Italian is still understood by some in former colonies. Although it was the primary language in Libya since colonial rule, Italian greatly declined under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi, who expelled the
Italian Libyan Italian settlers in Libya ( it, Italo-libici, also called Italian Libyans) typically refers to Italians and their descendants, who resided or were born in Libya during the Italian colonial period. History Italian heritage in Libya can be dat ...
population and made Arabic the sole official language of the country. A few hundred Italian settlers returned to Libya in the 2000s. Italian was the official language of Eritrea during Italian colonisation. Italian is today used in commerce, and it is still spoken especially among elders; besides that, Italian words are incorporated as loan words in the main language spoken in the country (Tigrinya). The capital city of Eritrea, Asmara, still has several Italian schools, established during the colonial period. In the early 19th century, Eritrea was the country with the highest number of Italians abroad, and the
Italian Eritreans Italian Eritreans (or Eritrean Italians) are Eritrean-born descendants of Italian settlers as well as Italian long-term residents in Eritrea. History Their ancestry dates back from the beginning of the Italian colonization of Eritrea at the end o ...
grew from 4,000 during World War I to nearly 100,000 at the beginning of World War II. In Asmara there are two Italian schools, the Italian School of Asmara (Italian primary school with a
Montessori The Montessori method of education involves children's natural interests and activities rather than formal teaching methods. A Montessori classroom places an emphasis on hands-on learning and developing real-world skills. It emphasizes indepen ...
department) and the Liceo Sperimentale "G. Marconi" (Italian international senior high school). Italian was also introduced to Somalia through colonialism and was the sole official language of administration and education during the colonial period but fell out of use after government, educational and economic infrastructure were destroyed in the
Somali Civil War The Somali Civil War ( so, Dagaalkii Sokeeye ee Soomaaliya; ar, الحرب الأهلية الصومالية ) is an ongoing civil war that is taking place in Somalia. It grew out of resistance to the Military dictatorship, military junta wh ...
. Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia. Although over 17 million Americans are of Italian descent, only a little over one million people in the United States speak Italian at home. Nevertheless, an Italian language media market does exist in the country. In Canada, Italian is the second most spoken non-official language when varieties of Chinese are not grouped together, with 375,645 claiming Italian as their mother tongue in 2016. Italian immigrants to South America have also brought a presence of the language to that continent. According to some sources, Italian is the second most spoken language in
Argentina Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the List of South American countries by area, second-largest ...
after the official language of Spanish, although its number of speakers, mainly of the older generation, is decreasing. Italian bilingual speakers can be found in the Southeast of Brazil as well as in the South, corresponding to 2.07% of the total population of the country. In Venezuela, Italian is the most spoken language after Spanish and Portuguese, with around 200,000 speakers. In Uruguay, people that speak Italian as their home language is 1.1% of the total population of the country. In Australia, Italian is the second most spoken foreign language after Chinese, with 1.4% of the population speaking it as their home language. The main Italian-language newspapers published outside Italy are the '' L'Osservatore Romano'' (
Vatican City Vatican City (), officially the Vatican City State ( it, Stato della Città del Vaticano; la, Status Civitatis Vaticanae),—' * german: Vatikanstadt, cf. '—' (in Austria: ') * pl, Miasto Watykańskie, cf. '—' * pt, Cidade do Vati ...
), the ''L'Informazione di San Marino'' ( San Marino), the ''
Corriere del Ticino ''Corriere del Ticino'' is a regional daily newspaper in the canton of Ticino, Switzerland. History and profile ''Corriere del Ticino'' was established in 1891. The paper is published in the Italian language in Muzzano, Ticino. In the early 1 ...
'' and the '' laRegione Ticino'' (
Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...
), the '' La Voce del Popolo'' ( Croatia), the ''Corriere d'Italia'' (Germany), the ''L'italoeuropeo'' (United Kingdom), the ''Passaparola'' ( Luxembourg), the ''
America Oggi ''America Oggi'', or ''America Today'', is an Italian-language daily newspaper published in Norwood, New Jersey, for Italian immigrants in the United States. It was founded by journalists of the closed ''Il Progresso Italo-Americano''. In May 2 ...
'' (United States), the ''
Corriere Canadese ''Corriere Canadese'' ("The Canadian Courier") is an Italian-language daily newspaper published in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The publication is distributed exclusively in Ontario and Quebec, primarily throughout the Greater Toronto and the Great ...
'' and the ''
Corriere Italiano ''Corriere Italiano'' ("Italian Courier") is an Italian-language daily newspaper published in Montreal, Quebec. The ''Corriere Italiano'' was founded by Alfredo Gagliardi, president of the Italian Order of Sons of Italy in Canada, in Montreal in ...
'' (Canada), the ''Il punto d'incontro'' (Mexico), the ''L'Italia del Popolo'' (
Argentina Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the List of South American countries by area, second-largest ...
), the ''Fanfulla'' (Brazil), the ''Gente d'Italia'' ( Uruguay), the ''La Voce d'Italia'' ( Venezuela), the '' Il Globo'' (Australia) and the ''La gazzetta del Sud Africa'' (South Africa).


Education

Italian is widely taught in many schools around the world, but rarely as the first foreign language. In the 21st century, technology also allows for the continual spread of the Italian language, as people have new ways to learn how to speak, read, and write languages at their own pace and at any given time. For example, the free website and application
Duolingo Duolingo ( ) is an American educational technology company which produces learning apps and provides language certification. On its main app, users can practice vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and listening skills using spaced repetition. D ...
has 4.94 million English speakers learning the Italian language. According to the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, every year there are more than 200,000 foreign students who study the Italian language; they are distributed among the 90 Institutes of Italian Culture that are located around the world, in the 179 Italian schools located abroad, or in the 111 Italian lecturer sections belonging to foreign schools where Italian is taught as a language of culture.


Influence and derived languages

From the late 19th to the mid-20th century, thousands of Italians settled in Argentina, Uruguay, Southern Brazil and Venezuela, as well as in Canada and the United States, where they formed a physical and cultural presence. In some cases, colonies were established where variants of regional languages of Italy were used, and some continue to use this regional language. Examples are Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, where
Talian Talian may refer to: *Talian dialect Talian (or Brazilian Venetian, , , but ) is a dialect of the Venetian language, spoken primarily in the Serra Gaúcha region in the northeast of the state of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. It is also spoken ...
is used, and the town of
Chipilo Chipilo, officially known as Chipilo de Francisco Javier Mina, is a small city in the state of Puebla, Mexico. It is located south of the state capital Puebla, Puebla, at a height of above sea level. The name itself derives from Náhuatl, meaning ...
near Puebla, Mexico; each continues to use a derived form of
Venetian Venetian often means from or related to: * Venice, a city in Italy * Veneto, a region of Italy * Republic of Venice (697–1797), a historical nation in that area Venetian and the like may also refer to: * Venetian language, a Romance language s ...
dating back to the nineteenth century. Another example is Cocoliche, an Italian–Spanish pidgin once spoken in
Argentina Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the List of South American countries by area, second-largest ...
and especially in Buenos Aires, and Lunfardo.


Lingua franca

Starting in late medieval times in much of Europe and the Mediterranean, Latin was replaced as the primary commercial language by Italian language variants (especially Tuscan and Venetian). These variants were consolidated during the Renaissance with the strength of Italy and the rise of humanism and the arts. During that period, Italy held artistic sway over the rest of Europe. It was the norm for all educated gentlemen to make the Grand Tour, visiting Italy to see its great historical monuments and works of art. It thus became expected to learn at least some Italian. In England, while the classical languages
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
and Greek were the first to be learned, Italian became the second most common modern language after French, a position it held until the late 18th century when it tended to be replaced by German. John Milton, for instance, wrote some of his early poetry in Italian. Within the
Catholic Church The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwide . It is am ...
, Italian is known by a large part of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and is used in substitution for Latin in some official documents. Italian loanwords continue to be used in most languages in matters of art and music (especially classical music including opera), in the design and fashion industries, in some sports like football and especially in culinary terms.


Languages and dialects

In Italy, almost all the other languages spoken as the vernacular—other than standard Italian and some languages spoken among immigrant communities—are often called " Italian dialects", a label that can be very misleading if it is understood to mean "dialects ''of'' Italian". The Romance dialects of Italy are local evolutions of spoken Latin that pre-date the establishment of Italian, and as such are sister languages to the Tuscan that was the historical source of Italian. They can be quite different from Italian and from each other, with some belonging to different linguistic branches of Romance. The only exceptions to this are twelve groups considered " historical language minorities", which are officially recognized as distinct
minority language A minority language is a language spoken by a minority of the population of a territory. Such people are termed linguistic minorities or language minorities. With a total number of 196 sovereign states recognized internationally (as of 2019) ...
s by the law. On the other hand, Corsican (a language spoken on the French island of Corsica) is closely related to medieval Tuscan, from which Standard Italian derives and evolved. The differences in the evolution of Latin in the different regions of Italy can be attributed to the natural changes that all languages in regular use are subject to, and to some extent to the presence of three other types of languages: substrata, superstrata, and adstrata. The most prevalent were substrata (the language of the original inhabitants), as the Italian dialects were most likely simply Latin as spoken by native cultural groups. Superstrata and adstrata were both less important. Foreign conquerors of Italy that dominated different regions at different times left behind little to no influence on the dialects. Foreign cultures with which Italy engaged in peaceful relations with, such as trade, had no significant influence either. Throughout Italy, regional variations of Standard Italian, called Regional Italian, are spoken. Regional differences can be recognized by various factors: the openness of vowels, the length of the consonants, and influence of the local language (for example, in informal situations ', ' and ' replace the standard Italian ' in the area of Tuscany, Rome and Venice respectively for the infinitive "to go"). There is no definitive date when the various Italian variants of Latin—including varieties that contributed to modern Standard Italian—began to be distinct enough from Latin to be considered separate languages. One criterion for determining that two language variants are to be considered separate languages rather than variants of a single language is that they have evolved so that they are no longer mutually intelligible; this diagnostic is effective if mutual intelligibility is minimal or absent (e.g. in Romance, Romanian and Portuguese), but it fails in cases such as Spanish-Portuguese or Spanish-Italian, as educated native speakers of either pairing can understand each other well if they choose to do so; however, the level of intelligibility is markedly lower between Italian-Spanish, and considerably higher between the Iberian sister languages of Portuguese-Spanish. Speakers of this latter pair can communicate with one another with remarkable ease, each speaking to the other in his own native language without slang/jargon. Nevertheless, on the basis of accumulated differences in morphology, syntax, phonology, and to some extent lexicon, it is not difficult to identify that for the Romance varieties of Italy, the first extant written evidence of languages that can no longer be considered Latin comes from the ninth and tenth centuries C.E. These written sources demonstrate certain vernacular characteristics and sometimes explicitly mention the use of the vernacular in Italy. Full literary manifestations of the vernacular began to surface around the 13th century in the form of various religious texts and poetry.Although these are the first written records of Italian varieties separate from Latin, the spoken language had likely diverged long before the first written records appear, since those who were literate generally wrote in Latin even if they spoke other Romance varieties in person. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the use of Standard Italian became increasingly widespread and was mirrored by a decline in the use of the dialects. An increase in literacy was one of the main driving factors (one can assume that only literates were capable of learning Standard Italian, whereas those who were illiterate had access only to their native dialect). The percentage of literates rose from 25% in 1861 to 60% in 1911, and then on to 78.1% in 1951. Tullio De Mauro, an Italian linguist, has asserted that in 1861 only 2.5% of the population of Italy could speak Standard Italian. He reports that in 1951 that percentage had risen to 87%. The ability to speak Italian did not necessarily mean it was in everyday use, and most people (63.5%) still usually spoke their native dialects. In addition, other factors such as mass emigration, industrialization, and urbanization, and internal migrations after
World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...
, contributed to the proliferation of Standard Italian. The Italians who emigrated during the Italian diaspora beginning in 1861 were often of the uneducated lower class, and thus the emigration had the effect of increasing the percentage of literates, who often knew and understood the importance of Standard Italian, back home in Italy. A large percentage of those who had emigrated also eventually returned to Italy, often more educated than when they had left. The Italian dialects have declined in the modern era, as Italy unified under Standard Italian and continues to do so aided by mass media, from newspapers to radio to television.


Phonology

Italian has a seven-vowel system, consisting of , as well as 23 consonants. Compared with most other Romance languages, Italian phonology is conservative, preserving many words nearly unchanged from Vulgar Latin. Some examples: * Italian ' "fourteen" < Latin (cf. Spanish ', French ' ,
Catalan Catalan may refer to: Catalonia From, or related to Catalonia: * Catalan language, a Romance language * Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia Places * 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...
and Portuguese ) * Italian ''settimana'' "week" < Latin (cf. Romanian ''săptămână'', Spanish and Portuguese ''semana'', French ''semaine'' ,
Catalan Catalan may refer to: Catalonia From, or related to Catalonia: * Catalan language, a Romance language * Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia Places * 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...
''setmana'') * Italian ''medesimo'' "same" < Vulgar Latin * (cf. Spanish ''mismo'', Portuguese ''mesmo'', French ''même'' ,
Catalan Catalan may refer to: Catalonia From, or related to Catalonia: * Catalan language, a Romance language * Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia Places * 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...
''mateix''; note that Italian usually prefers the shorter ''stesso'') * Italian ''guadagnare'' "to win, earn, gain" < Vulgar Latin * < Germanic (cf. Spanish ''ganar'', Portuguese ''ganhar'', French ''gagner'' ,
Catalan Catalan may refer to: Catalonia From, or related to Catalonia: * Catalan language, a Romance language * Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia Places * 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...
''guanyar'') The conservative nature of Italian phonology is partly explained by its origin. Italian stems from a literary language that is derived from the 13th-century speech of the 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 ...
in the region of Tuscany, and has changed little in the last 700 years or so. Furthermore, the Tuscan dialect is the most conservative of all Italian dialects, radically different from the Gallo-Italian languages less than to the north (across the La Spezia–Rimini Line). The following are some of the conservative phonological features of Italian, as compared with the common
Western Romance Western Romance languages are one of the two subdivisions of a proposed subdivision of the Romance languages based on the La Spezia–Rimini Line. They include the Gallo-Romance and Iberian Romance branches. Gallo-Italic may also be include ...
languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Galician,
Catalan Catalan may refer to: Catalonia From, or related to Catalonia: * Catalan language, a Romance language * Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia Places * 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...
). Some of these features are also present in
Romanian Romanian may refer to: *anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania ** Romanians, an ethnic group **Romanian language, a Romance language ***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language **Romanian cuisine, traditiona ...
. * Little or no phonemic lenition of consonants between vowels, e.g. > ''vita'' "life" (cf. Romanian ''viață'', Spanish ''vida'' , French ''vie''), > ''piede'' "foot" (cf. Spanish ''pie'', French ''pied'' ). * Preservation of geminate consonants, e.g. > "year" (cf. Spanish , French , Romanian , Portuguese ). * Preservation of all Proto-Romance final vowels, e.g. > "peace" (cf. Romanian , Spanish , French ), > "eight" (cf. Romanian , Spanish , French ), > "I did" (cf. Romanian dialectal , Spanish , French ). * Preservation of most intertonic vowels (those between the stressed syllable and either the beginning or ending syllable). This accounts for some of the most noticeable differences, as in the forms ''quattordici'' and ''settimana'' given above. * Slower consonant development, e.g. > Italo-Western > ''foglia'' "leaf" (cf. Romanian ''foaie'' , Spanish ''hoja'' , French ''feuille'' ; but note Portuguese ''folha'' ). Compared with most other Romance languages, Italian has many inconsistent outcomes, where the same underlying sound produces different results in different words, e.g. > ''lasciare'' and ''lassare'', > ''cacciare'' and ''cazzare'', > ''sdrucciolare'', ''druzzolare'' and ''ruzzolare'', > ''regina'' and ''reina''. Although in all these examples the second form has fallen out of usage, the dimorphism is thought to reflect the several-hundred-year period during which Italian developed as a literary language divorced from any native-speaking population, with an origin in 12th/13th-century Tuscan but with many words borrowed from languages farther to the north, with different sound outcomes. (The La Spezia–Rimini Line, the most important isogloss in the entire Romance-language area, passes only about north of Florence.) Dual outcomes of Latin /p t k/ between vowels, such as > ''luogo'' but > ''fuoco'', was once thought to be due to borrowing of northern voiced forms, but is now generally viewed as the result of early phonetic variation within Tuscany. Some other features that distinguish Italian from the Western Romance languages: * Latin becomes rather than . * Latin becomes rather than or : > ''otto'' "eight" (cf. Spanish ''ocho'', French ''huit,'' Portuguese ''oito''). * Vulgar Latin becomes ''cchi'' rather than : > ''occhio'' "eye" (cf. Portuguese ''olho'' , French ''œil'' < ); but Romanian ''ochi'' . * Final is not preserved, and vowel changes rather than are used to mark the plural: ''amico'', ''amici'' "male friend(s)", ''amica'', ''amiche'' "female friend(s)" (cf. Romanian ''amic'', ''amici'' and ''amică'', ''amice''; Spanish ''amigo(s)'' "male friend(s)", ''amiga(s)'' "female friend(s)"); → ''tre, sei'' "three, six" (cf. Romanian ''trei'', ''șase''; Spanish ''tres'', ''seis''). Standard Italian also differs in some respects from most nearby Italian languages: * Perhaps most noticeable is the total lack of metaphony, though metaphony is a feature characterizing nearly every other Italian language. * No simplification of original , (which often became elsewhere).


Assimilation

Italian phonotactics do not usually permit verbs and polysyllabic nouns to end with consonants, except in poetry and song, so foreign words may receive extra terminal vowel sounds.


Writing system

Italian has a shallow orthography, meaning very regular spelling with an almost one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. In linguistic terms, the writing system is close to being a phonemic orthography. The most important of the few exceptions are the following (see below for more details): * The letter c represents the sound at the end of words and before the letters a, o, and u but represents the sound (as the first sound in the English word ''chair'') before the letters e and i. * The letter g represents the sound at the end of words and before the letters a, o, and u but represents the sound (as the first sound in the English word ''gem'') before the letters e and i. * The letter n represents the phoneme , which is pronounced (as in the English word ''sink'' or the name ''Ringo'') before the letters c and g when these represent velar plosives or , as in ''banco'' �baŋko ''fungo'' �fuŋɡo The letter q represents /k/ pronounced thus n also represents in the position preceding it: ''cinque'' �t͡ʃiŋkwe Elsewhere the letter n represents /n/ pronounced including before the affricates /t͡ʃ/ or /d͡ʒ/ (equivalent to the consonants of English ''church'' and ''judge'') spelled with c or g before the letters i and e : ''mancia'' �mant͡ʃa ''mangia'' �mand͡ʒa * The letter ''h'' is always silent: ''hotel'' /oˈtɛl/; ''hanno'' 'they have' and ''anno'' 'year' both represent /ˈanno/. It is used to form a digraph with ''c'' or ''g'' to represent /k/ or /g/ before ''i'' or ''e'': ''chi'' /ki/ 'who', ''che'' /ke/ 'what'; ''aghi'' /ˈagi/ 'needles', ''ghetto'' /ˈgetto/. * The spellings ''ci'' and ''gi'' represent only /tʃ/ (as in English ''church'') or /dʒ/ (as in English ''judge'') with no /i/ sound before another vowel (''ciuccio'' /ˈtʃuttʃo/ 'pacifier', ''Giorgio'' /ˈdʒɔrdʒo/) unless ''c'' or ''g'' precede stressed /i/ (''farmacia'' /farmaˈtʃia/ 'pharmacy', ''biologia'' /bioloˈdʒia/ 'biology'). Elsewhere ''ci'' and ''gi'' represent /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ followed by /i/: ''cibo'' /ˈtʃibo/ 'food', ''baci'' /ˈbatʃi/ 'kisses'; ''gita'' /ˈdʒita/ 'trip', ''Tamigi'' /taˈmidʒi/ 'Thames'.* The Italian alphabet is typically considered to consist of 21 letters. The letters j, k, w, x, y are traditionally excluded, though they appear in loanwords such as ''jeans'', ''whisky'', ''taxi'', ''xenofobo'', ''xilofono''. The letter has become common in standard Italian with the prefix ''extra-'', although ''(e)stra-'' is traditionally used; it is also common to use the Latin particle ''ex(-)'' to mean "former(ly)" as in: ''la mia ex'' ("my ex-girlfriend"), "Ex-Jugoslavia" ("Former Yugoslavia"). The letter appears in the first name ''Jacopo'' and in some Italian place-names, such as
Bajardo Bajardo (also Baiardo) ( lij, Baiardu) is a '' comune'' in the Province of Imperia in the Italian region Liguria. It is about southwest of Genoa and about west of Imperia. Its principal settlement, Bajardo itself, is a medieval village which st ...
, Bojano, Joppolo, Jerzu, Jesolo, Jesi, Ajaccio, among others, and in ''Mar Jonio'', an alternative spelling of ''Mar Ionio'' (the Ionian Sea). The letter may appear in dialectal words, but its use is discouraged in contemporary standard Italian. Letters used in foreign words can be replaced with
phonetically Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
equivalent native Italian letters and digraphs: , , or for ; or for (including in the standard prefix ''kilo-''); , or for ; , , , or for ; and or for . * The acute accent is used over word-final to indicate a stressed front close-mid vowel, as in ''perché'' "why, because". In dictionaries, it is also used over to indicate a stressed back close-mid vowel (''azióne''). The grave accent is used over word-final and to indicate a front open-mid vowel and a back open-mid vowel respectively, as in ''tè'' "tea" and ''può'' "(he) can". The grave accent is used over any vowel to indicate word-final stress, as in ''gioventù'' "youth". Unlike , which is a ''close''-mid vowel, a stressed final is almost always a back open-mid vowel (''andrò''), with a few exceptions, like ''metró'', with a stressed final back close-mid vowel, making for the most part unnecessary outside of dictionaries. Most of the time, the penultimate syllable is stressed. But if the stressed vowel is the final letter of the word, the accent is mandatory, otherwise it is virtually always omitted. Exceptions are typically either in dictionaries, where all or most stressed vowels are commonly marked. Accents can optionally be used to disambiguate words that differ only by stress, as for ''prìncipi'' "princes" and ''princìpi'' "principles", or ''àncora'' "anchor" and ''ancóra'' "still''/''yet". For monosyllabic words, the rule is different: when two orthographically identical monosyllabic words with different meanings exist, one is accented and the other is not (example: ''è'' "is", ''e'' "and"). * The letter distinguishes ''ho'', ''hai'', ''ha'', ''hanno'' (present indicative of ''avere'' "to have") from ''o'' ("or"), ''ai'' ("to the"), ''a'' ("to"), ''anno'' ("year"). In the spoken language, the letter is always silent. The in ''ho'' additionally marks the contrasting open pronunciation of the . The letter is also used in combinations with other letters. No phoneme exists in Italian. In nativized foreign words, the is silent. For example, ''hotel'' and ''hovercraft'' are pronounced and respectively. (Where existed in Latin, it either disappeared or, in a few cases before a back vowel, changed to : ''traggo'' "I pull" ← Lat. .) * The letters and can symbolize voiced or voiceless consonants. symbolizes or depending on context, with few minimal pairs. For example: ''zanzara'' "mosquito" and ''nazione'' "nation". symbolizes word-initially before a vowel, when clustered with a voiceless consonant (), and when doubled; it symbolizes when between vowels and when clustered with voiced consonants. Intervocalic varies regionally between and , with being more dominant in northern Italy and in the south. * The letters and vary in pronunciation between
plosives 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 (, ), li ...
and
affricates An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pa ...
depending on following vowels. The letter symbolizes when word-final and before the back vowels . It symbolizes as in ''chair'' before the front vowels . The letter symbolizes when word-final and before the back vowels . It symbolizes as in ''gem'' before the front vowels . Other Romance languages and, to an extent, English have similar variations for . Compare hard and soft C, hard and soft G. (See also palatalization.) * The digraphs and indicate ( and ) before . The digraphs and indicate "softness" ( and , the affricate consonants of English ''church'' and ''judge'') before . For example: : :Note: is silent in the digraphs '' '', '' ''; and is silent in the digraphs and before unless the is stressed. For example, it is silent in ''
ciao ''Ciao'' ( , ) is an informal salutation in the Italian language that is used for both "hello" and "goodbye". Originally from the Venetian language, it has entered the vocabulary of English and of many other languages around the world. Its du ...
'' and cielo , but it is pronounced in ''farmacia'' and ''farmacie'' . Italian has geminate, or double, consonants, which are distinguished by length and intensity. Length is distinctive for all consonants except for , , , , , which are always geminate when between vowels, and , which is always single. Geminate plosives and affricates are realized as lengthened closures. Geminate fricatives, nasals, and are realized as lengthened continuants. There is only one vibrant phoneme but the actual pronunciation depends on context and regional accent. Generally one can find a flap consonant in unstressed position whereas is more common in stressed syllables, but there may be exceptions. Especially people from the Northern part of Italy ( Parma, Aosta Valley, South Tyrol) may pronounce as , , or . Of special interest to the linguistic study of Regional Italian is 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 ...
'', or "Tuscan Throat", the weakening or lenition of intervocalic , , and in the Tuscan language. The voiced postalveolar fricative is present as a phoneme only in loanwords: for example, ''garage'' . Phonetic is common in Central and Southern Italy as an intervocalic allophone of : ''gente'' 'people' but ''la gente'' 'the people', ''ragione'' 'reason'.


Grammar

Italian
grammar In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraints, a field that includes doma ...
is typical of the grammar of
Romance languages 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 ...
in general. Cases exist for personal pronouns ( nominative, oblique, accusative, dative), but not for nouns. There are two basic classes of nouns in Italian, referred to as
genders Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most cultures us ...
, masculine and feminine. Gender may be
natural Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans ar ...
(''ragazzo'' 'boy', ''ragazza'' 'girl') or simply grammatical with no possible reference to biological gender (masculine ''costo'' 'cost', feminine ''costa'' 'coast'). Masculine nouns typically end in ''-o'' (''ragazzo'' 'boy'), with plural marked by ''-i'' (''ragazzi'' 'boys'), and feminine nouns typically end in ''-a'', with plural marked by ''-e'' (''ragazza'' 'girl', ''ragazze'' 'girls'). For a group composed of boys and girls, ''ragazzi'' is the plural, suggesting that ''-i'' is a general neutral plural. A third category of nouns is unmarked for gender, ending in ''-e'' in the singular and ''-i'' in the plural: ''legge'' 'law, f. sg.', ''leggi'' 'laws, f. pl.'; ''fiume'' 'river, m. sg.', ''fiumi'' 'rivers, m. pl.', thus assignment of gender is arbitrary in terms of form, enough so that terms may be identical but of distinct genders: ''fine'' meaning 'aim', 'purpose' is masculine, while ''fine'' meaning 'end, ending' (e.g. of a movie) is feminine, and both are ''fini'' in the plural, a clear instance of ''-i'' as a non-gendered default plural marker. These nouns often, but not always, denote inanimates. There are a number of nouns that have a masculine singular and a feminine plural, most commonly of the pattern m. sg. ''-o'', f. pl. ''-a'' (''miglio'' 'mile, m. sg.', ''miglia'' 'miles, f. pl.'; ''paio'' 'pair, m. sg., ''paia'' 'pairs, f. pl.'), and thus are sometimes considered neuter (these are usually derived from neuter Latin nouns). An instance of neuter gender also exists in pronouns of the third person singular. Examples: Nouns, adjectives, and articles inflect for gender and number (singular and plural). Like in English, common nouns are capitalized when occurring at the beginning of a sentence. Unlike English, nouns referring to languages (e.g. Italian), speakers of languages, or inhabitants of an area (e.g. Italians) are not capitalized. There are three types of adjectives: descriptive, invariable and form-changing. Descriptive adjectives are the most common, and their endings change to match the number and gender of the noun they modify. Invariable adjectives are adjectives whose endings do not change. The form changing adjectives "buono (good), bello (beautiful), grande (big), and santo (saint)" change in form when placed before different types of nouns. Italian has three degrees for comparison of adjectives: positive, comparative, and superlative. The order of words in the phrase is relatively free compared to most European languages. The position of the verb in the phrase is highly mobile. Word order often has a lesser grammatical function in Italian than in English. Adjectives are sometimes placed before their noun and sometimes after. Subject nouns generally come before the verb. Italian is a null-subject language, so that nominative pronouns are usually absent, with subject indicated by verbal inflections (e.g. ''amo'' 'I love', ''ama'' '(s)he loves', ''amano'' 'they love'). Noun objects normally come after the verb, as do pronoun objects after imperative verbs, infinitives and gerunds, but otherwise pronoun objects come before the verb. There are both indefinite and definite
articles Article often refers to: * Article (grammar), a grammatical element used to indicate definiteness or indefiniteness * Article (publishing), a piece of nonfictional prose that is an independent part of a publication Article may also refer to: ...
in Italian. There are four indefinite articles, selected by the gender of the noun they modify and by the phonological structure of the word that immediately follows the article. ''Uno'' is masculine singular, used before ''z'' ( or ), ''s+consonant'', ''gn'' (), or ''ps'', while masculine singular ''un'' is used before a word beginning with any other sound. The noun ''zio'' 'uncle' selects masculine singular, thus ''uno zio'' 'an uncle' or ''uno zio anziano'' 'an old uncle,' but ''un mio zio'' 'an uncle of mine'. The feminine singular indefinite articles are ''una'', used before any consonant sound, and its abbreviated form, written ''un','' used before vowels: ''una camicia'' 'a shirt', ''una camicia bianca'' 'a white shirt', ''un'altra camicia'' 'a different shirt'. There are seven forms for definite articles, both singular and plural. In the singular: ''lo'', which corresponds to the uses of ''uno''; ''il'', which corresponds to the uses with consonant of ''un''; ''la,'' which corresponds to the uses of ''una''; ''l','' used for both masculine and feminine singular before vowels. In the plural: ''gli'' is the masculine plural of ''lo and l'''; ''i'' is the plural of ''il''; and ''le'' is the plural of feminine ''la'' and ''l'''. There are numerous contractions of prepositions with subsequent
articles Article often refers to: * Article (grammar), a grammatical element used to indicate definiteness or indefiniteness * Article (publishing), a piece of nonfictional prose that is an independent part of a publication Article may also refer to: ...
. There are numerous productive suffixes for diminutive, augmentative, pejorative, attenuating, etc., which are also used to create neologisms. There are 27 pronouns, grouped in clitic and tonic pronouns. Personal pronouns are separated into three groups: subject, object (which take the place of both direct and indirect objects), and reflexive. Second person subject pronouns have both a polite and a familiar form. These two different types of address are very important in Italian social distinctions. All object pronouns have two forms: stressed and unstressed (clitics). Unstressed object pronouns are much more frequently used, and come before a verb conjugated for subject verb (''La vedi''. 'You see her.'), after (in writing, attached to) non-conjugated verbs (''vendendola'' 'seeing her'). Stressed object pronouns come after the verb, and are used when emphasis is required, for contrast, or to avoid ambiguity (''Vedo lui, ma non lei''. 'I see him, but not her'). Aside from personal pronouns, Italian also has demonstrative, interrogative, possessive, and relative pronouns. There are two types of demonstrative pronouns: relatively near (this) and relatively far (that). Demonstratives in Italian are repeated before each noun, unlike in English. There are three regular sets of verbal conjugations, and various verbs are irregularly conjugated. Within each of these sets of conjugations, there are four simple (one-word) verbal conjugations by person/number in the indicative mood ( present tense; past tense with imperfective aspect, past tense with perfective aspect, and future tense), two simple conjugations in the subjunctive mood (present tense and past tense), one simple conjugation in the conditional mood, and one simple conjugation in the imperative mood. Corresponding to each of the simple conjugations, there is a compound conjugation involving a simple conjugation of "to be" or "to have" followed by a past participle. "To have" is used to form compound conjugation when the verb is transitive ("Ha detto", "ha fatto": he/she has said, he/she has made/done), while "to be" is used in the case of verbs of motion and some other intransitive verbs ("È andato", "è stato": he has gone, he has been). "To be" may be used with transitive verbs, but in such a case it makes the verb passive ("È detto", "è fatto": it is said, it is made/done). This rule is not absolute, and some exceptions do exist.


Words


Conversation

Note: the plural form of verbs could also be used as an extremely formal (for example to noble people in monarchies) singular form (see royal we).


Question words


Time


Numbers


Days of the week


Months of the year


See also

* Languages of Italy (includes "Italian dialects", ) * Accademia della Crusca *
CELI The ''Certificato di Conoscenza della Lingua Italiana'' (Certificate of Knowledge of Italian Language), or CELI, is an internationally recognized qualification of the Italian language destined for foreigners wanting to validate their relative Ita ...
*
CILS (Qualification) The Certification of Italian as a Foreign Language (Certificazione di Italiano come Lingua Straniera or CILS) is a qualification offered by the Foreigners University of Siena for foreign speakers of the Italian language, recognizing various levels o ...
* '' Enciclopedia Italiana'' * Italian alphabet * Regional Italian *
Italian exonyms ''Below is list of Italian language exonyms for places in non-Italian-speaking areas of the world'' Albania Algeria Australia Austria Bangladesh Belgium Brazil Bulgaria Burkina Faso Canada Chile China ...
* Italian grammar * Italian honorifics * List of countries and territories where Italian is an official language * The Italian Language Foundation (in the United States) * Italian language in Croatia * Italian language in Slovenia * Italian language in the United States * Italian language in Venezuela *
Italian literature Italian literature is written in the Italian language, particularly within Italy. It may also refer to literature written by Italians or in other languages spoken in Italy, often languages that are closely related to modern Italian, includin ...
* Italian musical terms * Italian phonology * Italian profanity * Italian Sign Language * Italian Studies * Italian Wikipedia * Italian-language international radio stations *
Lessico etimologico italiano The ''Lessico etimologico italiano'' (''LEI'') is an etymological dictionary of the Italian language. It has been published since 1979 by the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz Mainz () is the capital and largest city of ...
* Sicilian School * Veronese Riddle * Languages of the Vatican City *
Talian Talian may refer to: *Talian dialect Talian (or Brazilian Venetian, , , but ) is a dialect of the Venetian language, spoken primarily in the Serra Gaúcha region in the northeast of the state of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. It is also spoken ...
* List of English words of Italian origin * List of Italian musical terms used in English


Notes


References


Bibliography

* * * * * * * * * M. Vitale, ''Studi di Storia della Lingua Italiana'', LED Edizioni Universitarie, Milano, 1992, * S. Morgana, ''Capitoli di Storia Linguistica Italiana'', LED Edizioni Universitarie, Milano, 2003, * J. Kinder, ''CLIC: Cultura e Lingua d'Italia in CD-ROM / Culture and Language of Italy on CD-ROM'', Interlinea, Novara, 2008, * (with a similar list of other Italian-modern languages dictionaries)


External links

*
Il Nuovo De Mauro
* * Swadesh list in English and Italian * Italian proverbs *
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, '' BBC'' {{DEFAULTSORT:Italian Language Fusional languages Languages attested from the 10th century Languages of Italy Languages of Monaco Languages of San Marino Languages of Sicily Languages of Switzerland Languages of Vatican City Languages of Slovenia Languages of Croatia Subject–verb–object languages