vItalian language

 Article
 Talk
 Read
 Edit
 View history
Tools





















Appearance
hide
Text

Small

Standard

Large
Width

Standard
Wide
Color (beta)

Automatic
 Light

Dark
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the Italian language. For the regional varieties of standard
Italian, see Regional Italian.
"Italiano" redirects here. For other uses, see Italiano (disambiguation).

Italian

italiano, lingua italiana

[itaˈljaːno] ⓘ
Pronunciation

Native to Italy, San Marino, Vatican

City, Switzerland, Slovenia (Slovenia
n Littoral), Croatia (Western Croatia)

Speakers L1: 65 million (2022)[1]

L2: 3.1-21 million[1][2]
Total: 85 million[1]
Language family Indo-European

 Italic
 Latino-Faliscan
 Latin
 Romance
 Italo-Western
 Italo-Dalmatian
 Italo-Romance
 Italian

Early forms Old Latin

 Vulgar Latin
 Tuscan
 Florentine

Dialects Maltese Italian

Swiss Italian
Various forms of regional Italian
Writing system Latin script (Italian alphabet)
Italian Braille
Signed forms Italiano segnato "(Signed Italian)"[3]
italiano segnato esatto "(Signed
Exact Italian)"[4]

Official status
Official language in 4 countries

2 regions

Various organisations and orders

Recognised 5 countries
minority
language in

Regulated by Accademia della Crusca (de facto)

Language codes

ISO 639-1 it

ISO 639-2 ita

ISO 639-3 ita

Glottolog ital1282

Linguasphere 51-AAA-q
 Geographical distribution of the Italian language in the
world:
Areas where it is the majority language
Areas where it is a minority language or where it was a
former colonial language
Areas where notable Italian-speaking communities are
present
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without
proper rendering support, you may see question marks,
boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For
an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

This article is part of the series on the

Italian language

 Italo-Dalmatian languages
 Tuscan (Florentine)
 Regional Italian
 Accademia della Crusca
 Enciclopedia Treccani

History
 Veronese Riddle
 Placiti Cassinesi
 Sicilian School
 Dolce Stil Novo
 The Divine Comedy
 Pontifical Academy of Arcadia
 Italian Purism
 The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis
 The Betrothed

Literature and other

 Culture
 Literature
 Music
  Philosophy
 Poetry
 Comics
 Italophilia

Grammar
 Verb conjugation

Alphabet
 Orthography
 Braille

Phonology
 Syntactic gemination
 Tuscan gorgia

 v
 t
 e
Italian (italiano, pronounced [itaˈljaːno] ⓘ, or lingua italiana, pronounced [ˈliŋɡwa ita
ˈljaːna]) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family. It evolved
from the colloquial Latin of the Roman Empire,[7] and is the least divergent language
from Latin, together with Sardinian.[8] It is spoken by 68 to 85 million people, including
64 million native speakers as of 2024.[2][1] Some speakers of Italian are native
bilinguals of both Italian (either in its standard form or regional varieties) and a local
language of Italy, most frequently the language spoken at home in their place of
origin.[1]
Italian is an official language in Italy, San Marino, Switzerland (Ticino and
the Grisons), and Vatican City, and it has official minority
status in Croatia, Slovenia (Istria), Romania,[6][9] Bosnia and Herzegovina,[6] and in 6
municipalities of Brazil.[10][11] It is also spoken in other European and non-EU
countries, most notably in Malta (by 66% of the population),[12] Albania and Monaco,
[2]
as well as by large immigrant and expatriate communities in
the Americas, Australia and on other continents.[1]

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 third-most-widely spoken
native language in the European Union (13% of the EU population) and it is spoken
as a second language by 13 million EU citizens (3%).[13][14][15] Italian is the main
working language of the Holy See, serving as the lingua franca in the Roman
Catholic hierarchy and the official language of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

Italian influence led to the development of derivated languages and

dialects worldwide. It is also widespread in various sectors and markets, with its
loanwords used in arts, luxury goods, fashion, sports and cuisine; it 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,
including in English.[16] Almost all native Italian words end with vowels, and the
language has a 7-vowel sound system ("e" and "o" have mid-low and mid-high
sounds).[17] Italian has contrast between short and long
consonants and gemination (doubling) of consonants.

History
"History of Italian" redirects here. For the history of the Italian people, see Italians.
For the history of the Italian culture, see culture of Italy.
Origins

The Veronese Riddle (c. 8th or early 9th century),

a riddle reflecting either a form of Medieval Latin or the earliest extant example of
Romance vernacular in Italy
The Italian language has developed through a long and slow process, which began
after the Western Roman Empire's fall and the onset of the Middle Ages in the 5th
century.[18]

Latin, the predominant language of the western Roman Empire, remained the
established written language in Europe during the Middle Ages, although most
people were illiterate. Over centuries, the Vulgar Latin popularly spoken in various
areas of Europe—including the Italian peninsula—evolved into local varieties, or
dialects, unaffected by formal standards and teachings. These varieties are not in
any sense "dialects" of standard Italian, which itself started off as one of these local
tongues, but sister languages of Italian.[19][20]

The linguistic and historical demarcations between late Vulgar Latin and early
Romance varieties in Italy are imprecise. 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.[21] The Commodilla catacomb
inscription likewise probably dates to the early 9th century and appears to reflect a
language somewhere between late Vulgar Latin and early vernacular.
 Dante Alighieri, whose works helped establish
modern Italian language, is considered one of the greatest poets of the Middle Ages.
His epic poem Divine Comedy ranks among the finest works of world literature.[22]
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 Commedia, to which another Tuscan poet Giovanni
Boccaccio later affixed the title Divina, were read throughout the Italian peninsula.
His written vernacular became the touchstone for elaborating a "canonical standard"
that all educated Italians could understand. The poetry of Petrarch was also widely
admired and influential in the development of the literary language, and would be
identified as a model for vernacular writing by Pietro Bembo in the 16th century.

In addition to the widespread exposure gained through literature, Florentine also

gained prestige due to the political and cultural significance of Florence at the time
and the fact that it was linguistically a middle way between the northern and the
southern Italian dialects.

Italian was progressively made an official language of most of the Italian states
predating unification, slowly replacing Latin, even when ruled by foreign powers
(such as Spain in the Kingdom of Naples, or Austria in the Kingdom of Lombardy–
Venetia), although 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 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. va bene 'all right' is pronounced [vabˈbɛːne] by
a Roman (and by any standard Italian speaker), [vaˈbeːne] by a Milanese (and by
any speaker whose native dialect lies to the north of the La Spezia–Rimini Line); a
casa 'at home' is [akˈkaːsa] for Roman, [akˈkaːsa] or [akˈkaːza] for standard, [a
ˈkaːza] for Milanese and generally northern.[23]
In contrast to the Gallo-Italic linguistic panorama of northern Italy, the Italo-
Dalmatian, Neapolitan 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, although Venetian 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 il Rinascimento in Italian, was seen as a time of
rebirth, which is the literal meaning of both renaissance (from French)
and rinascimento (Italian). Among its many manifestations, the Renaissance saw a
reinvigorated interest in both classical antiquity and vernacular literature.[24]

Advancements in technology played a crucial role in the diffusion of the Italian l