Culture of Italy - Language

Language

Main article: Italian language See also: Latin

The great Romantic English poet, Lord Byron, described Italian as a language that sounds "as if it should be writ on satin." Byron's description is not an isolated expression of poetic fancy but, in fact, a popular view of the Italian language across the world, often called the language of "love," "poetry," and "song."

Italian, like English, belongs to the Indo-European family of languages. Like French and Spanish, it is a Romance language, one of the modern languages that developed from Latin. In particular, among the Romance languages, Italian is considered to be the closest to Latin in terms of vocabulary. It is spoken by about 60 million people in Italy, 23,000 in the Republic of San Marino, 400,000 in Switzerland, another 1,3 million in other European countries, and approximately 6 million in North and South America.

Standard Italian evolved from a dialect spoken in Tuscany (given that it was the first region to produce great writers as Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio). This dialect was adopted by the state after the unification of Italy, and is somewhat intermediate between the Italo-Dalmatian languages of the South and the Gallo-Italic languages of the North. Its development was also influenced by the other Italian dialects and by the Germanic language of post-Roman invaders.

There are only a few communities in Italy in which Italian is not spoken as the first language. German is the first language of many people of the Trentino-Alto Adige region. French is spoken as a first language in portions of the northwestern part of Italy. Slovenian, a Slavic language, and Ladin, a language similar to the Romansh of the Swiss, are spoken in northern sections of Venetia. Southern Italy has a few Greek- and Albanian-speaking communities.

Today, despite regional variations in the form of accents and vowel emphasis, Italian is fully comprehensible to most throughout the country. Many influences in Italy have helped standardize Italian. They include military service, education, and nationwide communication by means of newspapers, books, radio, and television.