Theatre in Italy - Language

Language

Main articles: Italian language and Languages of Italy

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 the Americas.

Standard Italian evolved from a dialect spoken in Tuscany, given that it was the first region to produce great writers as Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Thanks to its cultural prestige, this dialect was adopted first in the Italian states, and then by the Kingdom of Italy after the unification in 1861. It may be considered somewhat intermediate, linguistically and geographically, between the Italo-Dalmatian languages of the South and the Gallo-Italic languages of the North, and through Corsican varieties with Sardinian, becoming the center of a dialect continuum. 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, but many speakers are native bilinguals of both standardised Italian and other regional languages. These include native communities of Indo-European languages like Albanian, Croatian and Greek in southern Italy, Slovene and German varieties in Northern Italy, and dozens of various Romance languages, like Arpitan, Friulan, Ladin, Lombard, Neapolitan, Occitan, Sardinian, Sicilian, and many others.

Today, despite regional variations in the form of accents and vowel emphasis, Italian is fully comprehensible 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.