Language Monday: Italian
May 14, 2018
Italian is the national language of Italy and an official language of the European Union. It is also a second language in Switzerland, Vatican City, and the small republic of San Marino. Italian is recognized as a minority language in Brazil, Croatia, and Slovenia. In addition, it is spoken in countries that have large Italian immigrant populations. For example, about 1 million people speak Italian in the United States.
The Italian flag is often referred to as il Tricolore (the Tricolor) in Italian. Credit: © T. Lesia, Shutterstock
Italian belongs to the Indo-European family of languages. It is a Romance language, one of the modern languages that developed from Latin. Many forms of Italian are spoken throughout Italy. They are commonly called dialects, but they are more like separate languages than variations of one language.
When Italy became a unified country in 1861, more than 90 percent of the population spoke regional dialects. Today, Standard Italian is used throughout Italy, but it is the first language of few Italians. Most people speak a regional dialect, such as Milanese, Neapolitan, Sicilian, or Venetian, as their first language.
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Italy. Credit: WORLD BOOK map
The sounds of Italian are more simply organized than the sounds of English. Italian spelling is more consistent than English spelling, because each letter or combination of letters usually represents only one distinct sound. As a result, an Italian word is generally pronounced exactly as it is spelled.
Italian and English have similar systems of grammar. In both, the nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs have inflections, which are changes of form. More than 80 percent of the Italian vocabulary is shared with the French, Spanish, and Portuguese languages. Many Italian words have been absorbed into English, such as balcony, carnival, cash, costume, laundry, opera, and piano.
Italian gradually developed from Latin. It emerged as a separate language about A.D. 1000. It consisted of several local dialects that had formed in different regions. After about 1250, the region of Tuscany in northern Italy became the center of cultural life in Italy. The Tuscan dialect of the city of Florence and surrounding areas became the language of literature and culture. Tuscan was the language used by Boccaccio, Dante, and Petrarch, the three greatest Italian writers of the 1300’s.
From the 1300’s to the 1500’s, Italian was widely used as the language of commerce in the eastern Mediterranean area. By the mid-1500’s, Italian had almost completely replaced Latin as a written and spoken language.
The first novel written in Italian was I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed) by Alessandro Manzoni. The historical work was first published in 1827. Its story took place during the 1600’s in the Lombardy region of northern Italy and set the standard for modern Italian prose.
