Italian

The Italian language is a Romance one spoken by about 63 million people, mostly in Italy and Switzerland. In these places, the Italian language is official (in Switzerland along with German and French). Italy officially adopted Standard Italian officially adopted after the unification, based on Tuscan dialect and is intermediate between Italo-Dalmatian languages of the South and Northern Italian dialects of the North.

Italian has retained the contrast between short and long consonants which existed in Latin, unlike most other Romance languages. As in most Romance languages, stress is distinctive. In terms of vocabulary, Italian is considered one of the closest resembling Latin, though Romanian most closely preserves the noun declension system of Classical Latin, and Spanish the verb conjugation system, while Sardinian is the most conservative in terms of phonology.

History of the Italian language

The history of the Italian language is long, even though the modern standard of the language was shaped by relatively recent events. The earliest surviving texts which are definitely Italian (as opposed to its predecessor Vulgar Latin) are legal formulae from the region of Benevento dating from 960-963.

Italian was first formalized in the beginning of the 14th century through the works of Dante Alighieri, who mixed southern Italian languages, principally Sicilian, with his native Tuscan in his epic poems known collectively as the Commedia (Giovanni Boccaccio later affixed the title Divina). Dante's works were read throughout Italy and his written dialect became the "canonical standard" that others could all understand. Dante is thought to create the Italian language and, thus, the dialect of Tuscany became the basis for what would become the official language of Italy.

Each city in Italy has a distinctive dialect, since the cities were until recently thought of as city-states. The gemination of initial consonants and the pronunciation of stressed "e" and "s" in some cases are the most characteristic differences between Roman Italian and Milanese Italian.

Unlike the dialects of northern Italy, the older southern Italian dialects were not influenced by the Franco-Occitan influences, that were introduced to Italy, principally by bards from France, during the middle Ages. The economic might and relative advanced development of Tuscany at the time (Late Middle Ages), gave its dialect importance, though Venetian remained widespread in medieval Italian commercial life. Moreover, the increasing cultural relevance of Florence during the periods of Umanesimo (Humanism) and the Rinascimento (Renaissance) made its volgare (dialect), or rather a refined version of it, a standard in the arts.

In the 16th century, thanks to the re-discovery of Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia and a renewed interest in linguistics, it sparked a debate which raged throughout Italy concerning which criteria should be chosen to establish a modern Italian standard to be used as much as a literary as a spoken language. Three points of view emerged : the purists, headed by Pietro Bembo who claimed that the language might only be based on the great literary classics (notably, Petrarch, and Boccaccio but not Dante as Bembo believed that the Divine Comedy was not dignified enough as it used elements from other dialects), Niccolò Machiavelli and other Florentines preferred the version spoken by ordinary people in their own times, and the Courtesans like Baldassarre Castiglione and Gian Giorgio Trissino who insisted that each local vernacular must contribute to the new standard. Finally Bembo's ideas prevailed, therefore first Italian dictionary was published in 1612 and the foundation of the Accademia della Crusca.

Alessandro Manzoni wrote I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), that is considered as the Italian literature's first modern novel. It further defined the standard by "rinsing" his Milanese 'in the waters of the Arno" (Florence's river), as he states in the Preface to his 1840 edition.

Many more words and idioms from their home dialects as"ciao"(Venetian) or "panettone" (Milanese) were introduced by civil servants and soldiers recruited from all over the country after unification.

Classification of the Italian language

Italian is most closely related to Sicilian and the extinct Dalmatian. These three languages are part of the Italo-Western grouping of the Romance languages, which are a subgroup of the Italic branch of Indo-European.

Geographic distribution of the Italian language

The Italian language is language of Italy and San Marino, and one of the official languages of Switzerland, spoken mainly in Ticino and Grigioni cantons, a region that is called the Italian Switzerland. Moreover, it is the second official language in the Vatican City and in some areas of Istria in Slovenia and Croatia with an Italian minority. In Monaco and Malta, it is widely used and taught. It is also widely spoken in Corsica, Savoy and Nice (Italian dialects used to be spoken before annexation to France), and Albania.
Some Italian colonies, such as Lybia, Somalia and Eritrea can speak Italian. Nevertheless, the use of the Italian language is descending since the colonial period. In spite of being the language of instruction in Eritrea during the colonial period, as of 1997, there is only one Italian language school remaining, with 470 pupils. The Italian language is today used as the primary second one only in Libya.

The Italian language and its dialects are widely spoken by Italian immigrants and their descendents living throughout Western Europe (principally Germany, Luxembourg, and Belgium), the United States, Australia, Canada, and Latin America (principally Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela).