Language
Main article: Italian language See also: LatinThe 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.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Italy
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“You can’t write about people out of textbooks, and you can’t use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.”
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)
“In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we do not know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The “sayings” of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech—it is a gift from heart to heart.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)