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:
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“Language makes it possible for a child to incorporate his parents’ verbal prohibitions, to make them part of himself....We don’t speak of a conscience yet in the child who is just acquiring language, but we can see very clearly how language plays an indispensable role in the formation of conscience. In fact, the moral achievement of man, the whole complex of factors that go into the organization of conscience is very largely based upon language.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“When you’re lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is
taboo’d by anxiety,
I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in without impropriety;”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)