Italian language

| minority =

| agency = ()

| iso1 = it

| iso2 = ita

| iso3 = ita

| lingua = 51-AAA-q

| map = Map Italophone World - updated.png

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| mapcaption = Geographical distribution of the Italian language in the world:

| notice = IPA

| sign = "(Signed Italian)" "(Signed Exact Italian)"

| glotto = ital1282

| glottorefname = Italian

Italian (, , or , ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family. It is a standardised form of literary Florentine Tuscan and, together with Sardinian, is the least differentiated language from Latin. Current estimates indicate that between 68 and 85 million people speak Italian, including approximately 64 million native speakers as of 2024.

Italian is an official language in Italy, San Marino, Switzerland (Ticino and part of the Grisons), and Vatican City, and it has official minority status in Croatia, Slovenia (Istria), Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, It is also spoken in other European and non-EU countries, most notably in Malta (by 66% of the population), Albania (upwards of 70%), and Monaco, 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.

Italian is considered a conservative Romance language in phonology, lexicon, and morphology. 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). Italian has contrast between short and long consonants and gemination (doubling) of consonants.

History

=== Origins ===

thumb|The [[Veronese Riddle ( 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.

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. The Latin-speaking class referred to the collective Romance vernaculars of Europe as Romanz, Romance, or, in Italy, Romanzo or Volgare.

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. 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.

thumb|[[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.]]

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 vernacular for each city because the cities, until recently, were thought of as city-states. Those local languages have considerable variety, and 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 by a Roman (and by any standard Italian speaker), 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 for Roman, or for standard, for Milanese and generally northern.

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 in Italian, was seen as a time of rebirth, which is the literal meaning of both (from French) and (Italian). Among its many manifestations, the Renaissance saw a reinvigorated interest in both classical antiquity and vernacular literature.

Advancements in technology played a crucial role in the diffusion of the Italian language. The printing press was invented in the 15th century, and spread rapidly. By the year 1500, there were 56 printing presses in Italy, more than anywhere else in Europe. The printing press enabled the production of literature and documents in higher volumes and at lower cost, further accelerating the spread of Italian.

Italian became the language used in the courts of every state in the Italian peninsula, and the prestige variety used on the island of Corsica (but not in the neighbouring Sardinia, which on the contrary underwent Italianization well into the late 18th century, under Savoyard sway: the island's linguistic composition, roofed by the prestige of Spanish among the Sardinians, would therein make for a rather slow process of assimilation to the Italian cultural sphere). The rediscovery of Dante's , and a renewed interest in linguistics in the 16th century, sparked a debate that raged throughout Italy concerning the criteria that should govern the establishment of a modern Italian literary and spoken language. This discussion, known as questione della lingua (i.e., the problem of the language), ran through the Italian culture until the end of the 19th century, often linked to the political debate on achieving a united Italian state. Renaissance scholars divided into three main factions:

The purists, headed by Venetian Pietro Bembo (who, in his , claimed the language might be based only on the great literary classics, such as Petrarch and some part of Boccaccio). The purists thought the Divine Comedy was not dignified enough because it used elements from non-lyric registers of the language.
Niccolò Machiavelli and other Florentines preferred the version spoken by ordinary people in their own times.
The courtiers, such as Baldassare Castiglione and Gian Giorgio Trissino, insisted that each local vernacular contribute to the new standard.

A fourth faction claimed that the best Italian was the one that the papal court adopted, which was a mixture of the Tuscan and Roman dialects. Eventually, Bembo's ideas prevailed, and the foundation of the in Florence (1582–1583), the official legislative body of the Italian language, led to the publication of Agnolo Monosini's Latin tome in 1604 followed by the first Italian dictionary in 1612.

Modern era

An important event that helped the diffusion of Italian was the conquest and occupation of Italy by Napoleon (himself of Italian-Corsican descent) in the early 19th century. This conquest propelled the unification of Italy some decades after and pushed the Italian language into the status of a lingua franca, used not only among clerks, nobility, and functionaries in the Italian courts, but also by the bourgeoisie.

Today Italy has reached linguistic unity and an overwhelming majority of its 56 million citizens speak Italian. Many dialects are still alive, especially by the older generations. Today, Italian is one of the most studied foreign languages in the world.

Contemporary times

thumb|[[Alessandro Manzoni is famous for the novel The Betrothed (1827), ranked among the masterpieces of world literature. He contributed to the nationwide use of the Italian language.]]

The publication of Italian literature's first modern novel, (The Betrothed) by Alessandro Manzoni, both reflected and furthered the growing trend towards Italian as a national standard language. Manzoni, a Milanesian, chose to write the book in the Florentine dialect, describing this choice, in the preface to his 1840 edition, as "rinsing" his Milanese "in the waters of the Arno" (Florence's river). The novel is commonly described as "the most widely read work in the Italian language". It became a model for subsequent Italian literary fiction, while Arrigo Castellani estimated the same value as 10%.

Classification

Italian is a Romance language, a descendant of Vulgar Latin (colloquial spoken Latin). Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, especially its Florentine dialect, and is, therefore, an Italo-Dalmatian language, a classification that includes most other central and southern Italian languages and the extinct Dalmatian. As in most Romance languages, stress is distinctive in Italian.

According to Ethnologue, lexical similarity is 89% with French, 87% with Catalan, 85% with Sardinian, 82% with Spanish, 82% with Portuguese, 78% with Ladin, 77% with Romanian.

A 1949 study by the linguist Mario Pei concluded that out of seven Romance languages, Italian's stressed vowel phonology was the second-closest to that of Classical Latin (after Logudorese Sardinian). The study emphasized, however, that it represented only "a very elementary, incomplete and tentative demonstration" of how statistical methods could measure linguistic change, assigned "frankly arbitrary" point values to various types of change, and did not compare languages in the sample with respect to any characteristics or forms of divergence other than stressed vowels, among other caveats.

Geographic distribution

thumb|[[Swiss Italian|Italian language in Switzerland]]

Italian is the official language of Italy and San Marino and is spoken fluently by the majority of the countries' populations. Italian is the third most spoken language in Switzerland (after German and French; see Swiss Italian). It is official both on the national level and on regional level in two cantons: Ticino and Grisons. Ticino, which includes Lugano, the largest Italian-speaking city outside Italy, is the only canton where Italian is predominant. Italian is also used in administration and official documents in Vatican City.

Italian is also spoken by a minority in Monaco and France, especially in the southeastern part of the country. and the Niçard Vespers. Giuseppe Garibaldi complained about the referendum that allowed France to annex Savoy and Nice, and a group of his followers (among the Italian Savoyards) took refuge in Italy in the following years. Corsica passed from the Republic of Genoa to France in 1769 after the Treaty of Versailles. Italian was the official language of Corsica until 1859. Giuseppe Garibaldi called for the inclusion of the "Corsican Italians" within Italy when Rome was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy, but King Victor Emmanuel II did not agree to it. Italian is generally understood in Corsica by the population resident therein who speak Corsican, which is an Italo-Romance language similar to Tuscan. Francization occurred in Nice case, and caused a near-disappearance of the Italian language as many of the Italian speakers in these areas migrated to Italy. In Corsica, on the other hand, almost everyone still speaks the Corsican language, which, due to its linguistic proximity to the Italian standard language, appears both linguistically as an Italian dialect and therefore as a carrier of Italian culture, despite the French government's decades-long efforts to cut Corsica off from the Italian motherland. Italian was the official language in Monaco until 1860, when it was replaced by the French. This was due to the annexation of the surrounding County of Nice to France following the Treaty of Turin (1860). Italian served as Malta's official language until 1934, when it was abolished by the British colonial administration amid strong local opposition. Italian language in Slovenia is an officially recognised minority language in the country. The official census, carried out in 2002, reported 2,258 ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians) in Slovenia (0.11% of the total population). Italian language in Croatia is an official minority language in the country, with many schools and public announcements published in both languages. Their numbers dropped dramatically after World War II following the Istrian–Dalmatian exodus, which caused the emigration of between 230,000 and 350,000 Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians. Italian was the official language of the Republic of Ragusa from 1492 to 1807.

thumb|upright=1.4|right|Italy and [[Italian Empire|its colonial possessions in 1940]]

It formerly had official status in Albania due to the annexation of the country to the Kingdom of Italy (1939–1943). Albania has a large population of non-native speakers, with over half of the population having some knowledge of the Italian language. The Italian language is well-known and studied in Albania, due to its historical ties and geographical proximity to Italy and to the diffusion of Italian television in the country.

Due to heavy Italian influence during the Italian colonial period, Italian is still understood by some in former colonies such as Libya. A few hundred Italian settlers returned to Libya in the 2000s.

Italian was the official language of Eritrea during Italian colonisation. Italian is today used in commerce, and it is still spoken especially among elders; besides that, Italian words are incorporated as loan words in the main language spoken in the country (Tigrinya). The capital city of Eritrea, Asmara, still has several Italian schools, established during the colonial period. In the early 19th century, Eritrea was the country with the highest number of Italians abroad, and the Italian Eritreans grew from 4,000 during World War I to nearly 100,000 at the beginning of World War II. In Asmara there are two Italian schools, the Istituto Italiano Statale Omnicomprensivo di Asmara (Italian primary school with a Montessori department) and the Liceo Sperimentale "G. Marconi" (Italian international senior high school).

Italian was also introduced to Somalia through colonialism and was the sole official language of administration and education during the colonial period but fell out of use after government, educational and economic infrastructure were destroyed in the Somali Civil War.

thumb|upright=1.4|[[Italian language in the United States]]

Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia. Nevertheless, an Italian language media market does exist in the country. In Canada, Italian is the second most spoken non-official language when varieties of Chinese are not grouped together, with 375,645 claiming Italian as their mother tongue in 2016.

Italian immigrants to South America have also brought a presence of the language to that continent. According to some sources, Italian is the second most spoken language in Argentina after the official language of Spanish, although its number of speakers, mainly of the older generation, is decreasing. Italian bilingual speakers can be found scattered across the southeast of Brazil and in the south. In Uruguay, people who speak Italian as their home language are 1.1% of the total population of the country. In Australia, Italian is the second most spoken foreign language after Chinese, with 1.4% of the population speaking it as their home language.

The main Italian-language newspapers published outside Italy are the L'Osservatore Romano (Vatican City), the L'Informazione di San Marino (San Marino), the Corriere del Ticino and the laRegione Ticino (Switzerland), the La Voce del Popolo (Croatia), the Corriere d'Italia (Germany), the L'italoeuropeo (United Kingdom), the Passaparola (Luxembourg), the (United States), the Corriere Canadese and the Corriere Italiano (Canada), the Il punto d'incontro (Mexico), the L'Italia del Popolo (Argentina), the Fanfulla (Brazil), the Gente d'Italia (Uruguay), the La Voce d'Italia (Venezuela), the Il Globo (Australia) and the La gazzetta del Sud Africa (South Africa).

Education

thumb|[[Italian Secondary School, Rijeka|Italian Secondary School in Rijeka/Fiume, Croatia]]

Italian is widely taught in many schools around the world. In the 21st century, technology also allows for the continual spread of the Italian language, as people have new ways to learn how to speak, read, and write languages at their own pace and at any given time. For example, the free website and application Duolingo has 4.94 million English speakers learning the Italian language.

According to the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, every year there are more than 200,000 foreign students who study the Italian language; they are distributed among the 90 Institutes of Italian Culture that are located around the world, in the 179 Italian schools located abroad, or in the 111 Italian lecturer sections belonging to foreign schools where Italian is taught as a language of culture.

As of 2022, Australia had the highest number of students learning Italian in the world. This occurred because of support by the Italian community in Australia and the Italian Government and also because of successful educational reform efforts led by local governments in Australia.

Influence and derived languages

right|thumb|Municipalities where [[Talian dialect|Talian is co-official in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil]]thumb|Trilingual sign in [[San Francisco, Argentina, in Spanish, Italian, and Piedmontese]]

From the late 19th to the mid-20th century, millions of Italians settled in Argentina, Uruguay, southern Brazil, and Venezuela, and in Canada and the United States, where they formed a physical and cultural presence.

In some cases, colonies were established where variants of regional languages of Italy were used, and some continue to use this regional language. Examples are Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, where Talian is used, and the town of Chipilo near Puebla, Mexico; each continues to use a derived form of Venetian dating back to the 19th century. Other examples are Cocoliche, an Italian–Spanish pidgin once spoken in Argentina and especially in Buenos Aires, and Lunfardo. The Rioplatense Spanish dialect of Argentina and Uruguay today has thus been heavily influenced by both standard Italian and Italian regional languages as a result.

Lingua franca

Starting in late medieval times in much of Europe and the Mediterranean, Latin was replaced as the primary commercial language by languages of Italy, especially Tuscan and Venetian. These varieties were consolidated during the Renaissance with the strength of Italy and the rise of humanism and the arts.

Italy came to enjoy increasing artistic prestige within Europe. A mark of the educated gentlemen was to make the Grand Tour, visiting Italy to see its great historical monuments and works of art. It was expected that the visitor would learn at least some Italian, understood as language based on Florentine. In England, while the classical languages Latin and Greek were the first to be learned, Italian became the second most common modern language after French, a position it held until the late 18th century when it tended to be replaced by German. John Milton, for instance, wrote some of his early poetry in Italian.

Within the Catholic Church, Italian is known by a large part of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and is used in substitution for Latin in some official documents.

Italian loanwords continue to be used in most languages in matters of art and music (especially classical music including opera), in the design and fashion industries, in some sports such as football and especially in culinary terms.

Languages and dialects

thumb|Linguistic map of Italy according to Clemente Merlo and Carlo Tagliavini (1937)

thumb|Italy's ethno-linguistic minorities

In Italy, almost all the other languages spoken as the vernacular—other than standard Italian and some languages spoken among immigrant communities—are often called "Italian dialects", a label that can be very misleading if it is understood to mean "dialects of Italian". The Romance dialects of Italy are local evolutions of spoken Latin that pre-date the establishment of Italian, and as such are sister languages to the Tuscan that was the historical source of Italian. They can be quite different from Italian and from each other, with some belonging to different linguistic branches of Romance. The only exceptions to this are twelve groups considered "historical language minorities", which are officially recognised as distinct minority languages by the law. On the other hand, Corsican (a language spoken on the French island of Corsica) is closely related to medieval Tuscan, from which standard Italian derives and evolved.

The differences in the evolution of Latin in the different regions of Italy can be attributed to the natural changes that all languages in regular use are subject to, and to some extent to the presence of three other types of languages: substrata, superstrata, and adstrata. The most prevalent were substrata (the language of the original inhabitants), as the Italian dialects were most probably simply Latin as spoken by native cultural groups. Superstrata and adstrata were both less important. Foreign conquerors of Italy that dominated different regions at different times left behind little to no influence on the dialects. Foreign cultures with which Italy engaged in peaceful relations with, such as trade, had no significant influence either.

Throughout Italy, regional varieties of standard Italian, called Regional Italian, are spoken. Regional differences can be recognised by various factors: the openness of vowels, the length of the consonants, and influence of the local language (for example, in informal situations ', ' and ' replace the standard Italian ' in the area of Tuscany, Rome and Venice respectively for the infinitive 'to go').

There is no definitive date when the various Italian variants of Latin—including varieties that contributed to modern standard Italian—began to be distinct enough from Latin to be considered separate languages. One criterion for determining that two language variants are to be considered separate languages rather than variants of a single language is that they have evolved so that they are no longer mutually intelligible; this diagnostic is effective if mutual intelligibility is minimal or absent (e.g. in Romance, Romanian and Portuguese), but it fails in cases such as Spanish-Portuguese or Spanish-Italian, as educated native speakers of either pairing (particularly Spanish-Portuguese) can understand each other well if they choose to do so; however, the level of intelligibility is markedly lower between Italian-Spanish, and considerably higher between the Iberian sister languages of Portuguese-Spanish. Speakers of this latter pair can communicate with one another with remarkable ease, each speaking to the other in his own native language, without slang/jargon.

Nevertheless, on the basis of accumulated differences in morphology, syntax, phonology, and to some extent lexicon, it is not difficult to identify that for the Romance varieties of Italy, the first extant written evidence of languages that can no longer be considered Latin comes from the 9th and 10th centuries CE. These written sources demonstrate certain vernacular characteristics and sometimes explicitly mention the use of the vernacular in Italy.

Full literary manifestations of the vernacular began to surface around the 13th century in the form of various religious texts and poetry.Although these are the first written records of Italian varieties separate from Latin, the spoken language had probably diverged long before the first written records appeared since those who were literate generally wrote in Latin even if they spoke other Romance varieties in person.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the use of standard Italian became increasingly widespread and was mirrored by a decline in the use of the dialects. An increase in literacy was one of the main driving factors (one can assume that only literates were capable of learning standard Italian, whereas those who were illiterate had access only to their native dialect). The percentage of literates rose from 25% in 1861 to 60% in 1911, and then on to 78.1% in 1951. Tullio De Mauro, an Italian linguist, has asserted that in 1861, only 2.5% of the population of Italy could speak standard Italian. He reports that in 1951, that percentage had risen to 87%. The ability to speak Italian did not necessarily mean that it was in everyday use, and most people (63.5%) still usually spoke their native dialects. In addition, other factors such as mass emigration, industrialization, and urbanization, and internal migrations after World War II, contributed to the proliferation of standard Italian. The Italians who emigrated during the Italian diaspora beginning in 1861 were often of the uneducated lower class, and thus the emigration had the effect of increasing the percentage of literates, who often knew and understood the importance of standard Italian back home in Italy. A large percentage of those who had emigrated also eventually returned to Italy, often more educated than when they had left.

Although use of the Italian dialects has declined in the modern era, as Italy unified under standard Italian and continues to do so aided by mass media from newspapers to radio to television, diglossia is still frequently encountered in Italy and triglossia is not uncommon in emigrant communities among older speakers. Both situations normally involve some degree of code-switching and code-mixing.

Phonology

thumb|[[s:Bible (King James)/Luke#Chapter 2|Luke 2, 1–7 of the Bible being read by a speaker of Italian from Milan]]

Italian has a seven-vowel system, consisting of , and 23 consonants. Compared with most other Romance languages, Italian phonology is conservative, preserving many words nearly unchanged from Vulgar Latin. Some examples:

Italian ' 'fourteen' < Latin (cf. Spanish ', French ' , Catalan and Portuguese )
Italian settimana 'week' < Latin (cf. Romanian săptămână, Spanish and Portuguese semana, French semaine , Catalan setmana)
Italian medesimo 'same' < Vulgar Latin * (cf. Spanish mismo, Portuguese mesmo, French même , Catalan mateix; Italian usually prefers the shorter stesso)
Italian guadagnare 'to win, earn, gain' < Vulgar Latin * < Germanic (cf. Spanish ganar, Portuguese ganhar, French gagner , Catalan guanyar).

Evolution from Latin

The conservative nature of Italian phonology is partly explained by its origin. Italian stems from a literary language that is derived from the 13th-century speech of the city of Florence in the region of Tuscany, and has changed little in the last 700 years or so. Furthermore, the Tuscan dialect is the most conservative of all Italian dialects, radically different from the Gallo-Italian languages less than to the north (across the La Spezia–Rimini Line).

The following are some of the conservative phonological features of Italian, as compared with the common Western Romance languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, Catalan). Some of these features are also present in Romanian.

Little or no phonemic lenition of consonants between vowels, e.g. > vita 'life' (cf. Romanian viață, Spanish vida , French vie), > piede 'foot' (cf. Spanish pie, French pied ).
Words that are an exception to this rule exist, such as: > scodella 'bowl', > ricevere 'receive', > lago 'lake', > ago 'needle', (only in the Tuscan accent and historical standard Italian) > viso 'face'.
Preservation of geminate consonants, e.g. > 'year' (cf. Spanish , French , Romanian , Portuguese ).
Preservation of all Proto-Romance final vowels, e.g. > 'peace' (cf. Romanian , Spanish , French ), > 'eight' (cf. Romanian , Spanish , French ), > 'I did' (cf. Romanian dialectal , Spanish , French ).
Preservation of most intertonic vowels (those between the stressed syllable and either the beginning or ending syllable). This accounts for some of the most noticeable differences, as in the forms quattordici and settimana given above.
Slower consonant development, e.g. > Italo-Western > foglia 'leaf' (cf. Romanian foaie , Spanish hoja , French feuille ; but note Portuguese folha ).

Compared with most other Romance languages, Italian has many inconsistent outcomes, where the same underlying sound produces different results in different words, e.g. > lasciare and lassare, > cacciare and cazzare, > sdrucciolare, druzzolare and ruzzolare, > regina and reina. Although in all these examples the second form has fallen out of usage, the dimorphism is thought to reflect the several-hundred-year period during which Italian developed as a literary language divorced from any native-speaking population, with an origin in 12th/13th-century Tuscan but with many words borrowed from languages farther to the north, with different sound outcomes. (The La Spezia–Rimini Line, the most important isogloss in the entire Romance-language area, passes only about north of Florence.) Dual outcomes of Latin between vowels, such as > luogo but > fuoco, was once thought to be due to borrowing of northern voiced forms, but is now generally viewed as the result of early phonetic variation within Tuscany.

Some other features that distinguish Italian from the Western Romance languages:

Latin becomes rather than .
Latin becomes rather than or : > otto 'eight' (cf. Spanish ocho, French huit, Portuguese oito).
Vulgar Latin becomes cchi rather than : > occhio 'eye' (cf. Portuguese olho , French œil < ); but Romanian ochi .
Final is not preserved, and vowel changes rather than are used to mark the plural: amico, amici 'male friend(s)', amica, amiche 'female friend(s)' (cf. Romanian amic, amici and amică, amice; Spanish amigo(s) 'male friend(s)', amiga(s) 'female friend(s)'); → tre, sei 'three, six' (cf. Romanian trei, șase; Spanish tres, seis).

Standard Italian also differs in some respects from most nearby Italian languages:

Perhaps most noticeable is the total lack of metaphony, although metaphony is a feature characterizing nearly every other Italian language.
No simplification of original , (which often became elsewhere).

Assimilation

Italian phonotactics do not usually permit verbs and polysyllabic nouns to end with consonants, except in poetry and song, so foreign words may receive extra terminal vowel sounds.

Writing system

thumb|An Italian handwriting script, taught in primary school

Italian has a shallow orthography, meaning very regular spelling with an almost one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. In linguistic terms, the writing system is close to being a phonemic orthography. The most important of the few exceptions are the following (see below for more details):

The letter c represents the sound at the end of words and before the letters a, o, and u but represents the sound (as the first sound in the English word chair) before the letters e and i.
The letter g represents the sound at the end of words and before the letters a, o, and u but represents the sound (as the first sound in the English word gem) before the letters e and i.
The letter n represents the phoneme , which is pronounced (as in the English word sing) before the letters c and g when these represent velar plosives or , as in banco , fungo . The letter q represents pronounced [k], thus n also represents in the position preceding it: cinque . Elsewhere the letter n represents pronounced , including before the affricates or spelt with c or g before the letters i and e : mancia , mangia .
The letter h is always silent: hotel ; hanno 'they have' and anno 'year' both represent . It is used to form a digraph with c or g to represent or before i or e: chi 'who', che 'what'; aghi 'needles', ghetto .
The spellings ci and gi before another vowel represent only or with no /i/ sound (ciuccio 'pacifier', Giorgio ) unless c or g precede stressed (farmacia 'pharmacy', biologia 'biology'). Elsewhere ci and gi represent and followed by : cibo 'food', baci 'kisses'; gita 'trip', Tamigi 'Thames'.*

The Italian alphabet is typically considered to consist of 21 letters. The letters j, k, w, x, y are traditionally excluded, although they appear in loanwords such as jeans, whisky, taxi, and xilofono. The letter has become common in standard Italian with the prefix extra-, although (e)stra- is traditionally used; it is also common to use the Latin particle ex(-) to mean 'former(ly)' as in la mia ex ('my ex-girlfriend'), "Ex-Jugoslavia" ('Former Yugoslavia'). The letter appears in the first name Jacopo and in some Italian place-names, such as Bajardo, Bojano, Joppolo, Jerzu, Jesolo, Jesi, Ajaccio, among others, and in Mar Jonio, an alternative spelling of Mar Ionio (the Ionian Sea). The letter may appear in dialectal words, but its use is discouraged in contemporary standard Italian. Letters used in foreign words can be replaced with phonetically equivalent native Italian letters and digraphs: , , or for ; or for (including in the standard prefix kilo-); , or for ; , , , or for ; and or for .

The acute accent is used over word-final to indicate a stressed front close-mid vowel, as in perché 'why, because'. In dictionaries, it is also used over to indicate a stressed back close-mid vowel (azióne). The grave accent is used over word-final and to indicate a front open-mid vowel and a back open-mid vowel respectively, as in tè 'tea', and può '(he) can'. The grave accent is used over any vowel to indicate word-final stress, as in gioventù 'youth'. Unlike , which is a close-mid vowel, a stressed final is almost always a back open-mid vowel (andrò), with a few exceptions, such as metró, with a stressed final back close-mid vowel, making for the most part unnecessary outside of dictionaries. Most of the time, the penultimate syllable is stressed. But if the stressed vowel is the final letter of the word, the accent is mandatory, otherwise, it is virtually always omitted. Exceptions are typically either in dictionaries, where all or most stressed vowels are commonly marked. Accents can optionally be used to disambiguate words that differ only by stress, as for prìncipi 'princes' and princìpi 'principles', or àncora 'anchor' and ancóra 'still/yet'. For monosyllabic words, the rule is different: when two orthographically identical monosyllabic words with different meanings exist, one is accented and the other is not (example: è 'is', e 'and').
The letter distinguishes ho, hai, ha, hanno (present indicative of avere 'to have') from o ('or'), ai ('to the'), a ('to'), anno ('year'). In the spoken language, the letter is always silent. The in ho additionally marks the contrasting open pronunciation of the . The letter is also used in combinations with other letters. No phoneme exists in Italian. In nativized foreign words, the is silent. For example, hotel and hovercraft are pronounced and respectively. (Where existed in Latin, it either disappeared or, in a few cases before a back vowel, changed to : traggo 'I pull' ← Lat. .)
The letters and can symbolize voiced or voiceless consonants. symbolizes or depending on context, with few minimal pairs. For example: zanzara 'mosquito' and nazione 'nation'. symbolizes word-initially before a vowel, when clustered with a voiceless consonant (), and when doubled; it symbolizes when between vowels and when clustered with voiced consonants. Intervocalic varies regionally between and , with being more dominant in northern Italy and in the south.
The letters and vary in pronunciation between plosives and affricates depending on following vowels. The letter symbolizes when word-final and before the back vowels . It symbolizes as in chair before the front vowels . The letter symbolizes when word-final and before the back vowels . It symbolizes as in gem before the front vowels . Other Romance languages and, to an extent, English have similar variations for . Compare hard and soft C, hard and soft G. (See also palatalization.)
The digraphs and indicate ( and ) before . The digraphs and indicate 'softness' ( and , the affricate consonants of English church and judge) before . For example:

:{| class="wikitable"

! colspan="2" | Before back vowel (A, O, U)

! colspan="2" | Before front vowel (I, E)

! rowspan="2" | Plosive

! C

| caramella candy

! CH

| china India ink

! G

| gallo rooster

! GH

| ghiro edible dormouse

! rowspan="2" | Affricate

! CI

| ciambella donut

! C

| Cina China

! GI

| giallo yellow

! G

| giro round, tour

:Note: is silent in the digraphs ch (digraph)|, gh (digraph)|; and is silent in the digraphs and before unless the is stressed. For example, it is silent in ciao and cielo , but it is pronounced in farmacia and farmacie .

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There are three other special digraphs in Italian: gn (digraph)|, and . The digraph represents . represents before , and never at the beginning of a word, except in the personal pronoun and definite article gli. An exception is the word glicerina ("glycerin"), which is pronounced with a hard . (Compare with Spanish and , Portuguese and .) represents a fricative before . Except in the speech of some northern Italians, all of these are normally geminate between vowels.
In general, there is a clear one-to-one correspondence between letters or digraphs and phonemes, as in Spanish; in standard varieties of Italian, there is little allophonic variation. The most notable exceptions are assimilation of /n/ in point of articulation before consonants, assimilatory voicing of /s/ to following voiced consonants, and vowel length (vowels are long in stressed open syllables, except at the end of words, and short elsewhere) — compare with the substantial number of allophones of the English phoneme /t/. Spelling is mostly phonemic and usually difficult to mistake, given a clear pronunciation. Exceptions exist, especially in foreign borrowings. There are fewer cases of dyslexia than among speakers of languages such as English, and the concept of a spelling bee is strange to Italians.

Common variations

Some variations in the usage of the writing system may be present in practical use. These are scorned by educated people and normal written language, but they are so common in certain limited contexts that knowledge of them may be useful.

Usage of x instead of per "for". This is common among teenagers and in SMS abbreviations. The multiplication operator is read "per" in Italian. For example, per te ("for you") is shortened to x te (compared with English 4 u). The per within words can also be replaced with x. For example: perché ("why, because") to xché or xké; sapere ("to know") to saxe). This usage is useful shorthand in quick notes or in SMS, but it is unacceptable in formal writing.
Usage of foreign letters such as , and , especially in nicknames and SMS language: ke instead of che, Giusy instead of Giuseppina. This is mirrored in the usage of i in English names such as Staci instead of Stacey or in the usage of c in Northern Europe (Jacob instead of Jakob). The use of instead of or to represent a plosive sound is documented in some historical texts from before the standardization of the Italian language. The usage is no longer standard in Italian. The letter has sometimes been used in satire to suggest a political figure is an authoritarian or even a "pseudo-nazi". For example, Francesco Cossiga was famously nicknamed Kossiga by rioting students during his tenure as minister of internal affairs. Compare the politicized spelling Amerika in the USA. Although not a letter in the standard Italian alphabet, the letter is found in many of the languages of southern Italy, including Neapolitan and Sicilian. In modern texts written in any such language, the is often replaced with .
The following abbreviations are limited to electronic-communications media: nn for non "not"; cmq for comunque "anyway, however"; cm for come "how, like, as"; d for di "of"; (io/loro) sn for (io/loro) sono "I am, they are"; (io) dv for (io) devo "I must, I have to" or for dove "where"; (tu) 6 for (tu) sei "you are"; dmn for domani "tomorrow".
Whenever non-ASCII characters are unavailable or unreliable (as in e-mail), accents may be replaced with adjacent apostrophes. For example: in perche<nowiki>'</nowiki> instead of perché. The practice was standard on manual typewriters that had no accents and is still common for uppercase accented letters. Uppercase is rare and is absent from the Italian keyboard layout. It is often substituted with , even though there are several ways of producing the uppercase È on a computer.

Sounds

Vowels

Italian has seven vowel phonemes: , , , , , , , represented by five letters: "a, e, i, o, u". The pairs -, and - are seldom distinguished in writing and often confused, even though most varieties of Italian employ both phonemes consistently. Compare, for example standard "perché" (why, because) and "senti" (you hear), as pronounced by most central and southern speakers, with and , employed by most northern speakers. As a result, the usage is strongly indicative of a person's origin. The standard (Tuscan) usage of these vowels is listed in vocabularies, and employed outside Tuscany mainly by specialists, especially actors and a few (television) journalists.

These are truly different phonemes, however: compare (fishing) and (peach), both spelled pesca (). Similarly ('barrel') and ('beatings'), both spelled botte, discriminate and ().

In general, vowel combinations usually pronounce each vowel separately. Diphthongs exist (e.g. uo, iu, ie, ai), but are limited to an unstressed u or i before or after a stressed vowel.

The unstressed u in a diphthong approximates the English semivowel w, and the unstressed i approximates the semivowel y. E.g.: buono , ieri .

Triphthongs exist in Italian as well, like "continuiamo" ("we continue"). Three vowel combinations exist only in the form semiconsonant ( or ), followed by a vowel, followed by a desinence vowel (usually ), as in miei, suoi, or two semiconsonants followed by a vowel, as the group -uia- exemplified above, or -iuo- in the word aiuola.

Mobile diphthongs

Many Latin words with a short e or o have Italian counterparts with a so-called mobile diphthong (ie and uo respectively). The mobility, however, is of stress: when the vowel sound is stressed, it is pronounced and written as a diphthong, e.g. buono 'good'; when not stressed, it is pronounced and written as a single vowel, as in bontà 'goodness'.

So Latin focus gave rise to Italian fuoco (meaning both "fire" and "optical focus"): when unstressed, as in focale ("focal") the "o" remains alone. Latin pes (more precisely its accusative form pedem) is the source of Italian piede (foot): but unstressed "e" was left unchanged in pedone (pedestrian) and pedale (pedal). From Latin jocus comes Italian giuoco ("play", "game"), though in this case gioco is more common: giocare means "to play (a game)". From Latin homo comes Italian uomo (man), but also umano (human) and ominide (hominid). From Latin ovum comes Italian uovo (egg) and ovaie (ovaries). (The same phenomenon occurs in Spanish: juego (play, game) and jugar (to play), nieve (snow) and nevar (to snow)). Stress-conditioned historical diphthongization can also produce alternating verb stems, as in stem-stressed siedo 'I sit' and suffix-stressed sediamo 'we sit'.

Consonants

Two symbols in a table cell denote the voiceless and voiced consonants, respectively.

{| class="wikitable"

|+ Consonants of Italian

! Bilabial

! Labio- dental

! Dental/ Alveolar

! Post- alveolar

! Palatal

! Velar

! Nasal

| style="text-align: center;" |

| style="text-align: center;" | *

! Plosive

| style="text-align: center;" | ,

! Affricate

| style="text-align: center;" | ,

! Fricative

| style="text-align: center;" | ,

| style="text-align: center;" |

! Trill

| style="text-align: center;" |

! Lateral

| style="text-align: center;" |

! Approximant

| style="text-align: center;" |

Note: unlike in standard English, is not a phoneme in standard Italian; instead, when preceding a velar ( or ) appears as an allophone of . More generally, nasals assimilate to the point of articulation of whatever consonant they precede. -->

Italian has geminate, or double, consonants, which are distinguished by length and intensity. Length is distinctive for all consonants except for , , , , , which are always geminate when between vowels, and , which is always single.

Geminate plosives and affricates are realized as lengthened closures. Geminate fricatives, nasals, and are realized as lengthened continuants. There is only one vibrant phoneme but the actual pronunciation depends on the context and regional accent. Generally one can find a flap consonant in an unstressed position whereas is more common in stressed syllables, but there may be exceptions. Especially people from the northern part of Italy (Parma, Aosta Valley, South Tyrol) may pronounce as , , or .

Of special interest to the linguistic study of Regional Italian is the gorgia toscana, or "Tuscan throat", the weakening or lenition of intervocalic , , and in the Tuscan language.

The voiced postalveolar fricative is present as a phoneme only in loanwords: for example, garage . Phonetic is common in central and southern Italy as an intervocalic allophone of : gente 'people' but la gente 'the people', ragione 'reason'.

Grammar

Italian grammar is typical of the grammar of Romance languages in general. Cases exist for personal pronouns (nominative, oblique, accusative, dative), but not for nouns.

There are two basic classes of nouns in Italian, referred to as genders, masculine and feminine. Gender may be natural (ragazzo 'boy', ragazza 'girl') or simply grammatical with no possible reference to biological gender (masculine costo 'cost', feminine costa 'coast'). Masculine nouns typically end in -o (ragazzo 'boy'), with plural marked by -i (ragazzi 'boys'), and feminine nouns typically end in -a, with plural marked by -e (ragazza 'girl', ragazze 'girls'). For a group composed of boys and girls, ragazzi is the plural, suggesting that -i is a general neutral plural. A third category of nouns is unmarked for gender, ending in -e in the singular and -i in the plural: legge 'law, f. sg.', leggi 'laws, f. pl.'; fiume 'river, m. sg.', fiumi 'rivers, m. pl.', thus assignment of gender is arbitrary in terms of form, enough so that terms may be identical but of distinct genders: fine meaning 'aim', 'purpose' is masculine, while fine meaning 'end, ending' (e.g. of a movie) is feminine, and both are fini in the plural, a clear instance of -i as a non-gendered default plural marker. These nouns often, but not always, denote inanimates. There are a number of nouns that have a masculine singular and a feminine plural, most commonly of the pattern m. sg. -o, f. pl. -a (miglio 'mile, m. sg.', miglia 'miles, f. pl.'; paio 'pair, m. sg.', paia 'pairs, f. pl.'), and thus are sometimes considered neuter (these are usually derived from neuter Latin nouns). An instance of neuter gender also exists in pronouns of the third person singular.

Examples:

!IPA

|what (adj.)

|che

|/ke/

|what (standalone)

|cosa

|/ˈkɔza/, /ˈkɔsa/

|who

|chi

|/ki/

|how

|come

|/ˈkome/

|where

|dove

|/ˈdove/

|why, because

|perché

|/perˈke/

|which

|quale

|/ˈkwale/

|when

|quando

|/ˈkwando/

|how much

|quanto

|/ˈkwanto/

Time

{| class="wikitable"

!English

!Italian

Example text

thumb|Italian pronunciation

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Italian:

: Tutti gli esseri umani nascono liberi ed eguali in dignità e diritti. Essi sono dotati di ragione e di coscienza e devono agire gli uni verso gli altri in spirito di fratellanza.

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English:

: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

International Phonetic Alphabet transcription:

: [ˈtut.ti‿ʎ.ʎ‿ˈɛs.seri̯‿uˈmaːni ˈnaskono ˈliːberi e.d‿eˈgwaːli̯‿in diɲ.ɲiˈta e‿diˈrit.ti ‖ ˈɛs.si ˈsoːno doˈtaːti di raˈd͡ʒoːn‿e‿di koʃˈʃɛnt͡sa e‿ˈdɛːvono aˈd͡ʒiːre‿ʎ.ʎ‿ˈuːni ˈvɛr.so‿ʎ.ʎ‿ˈaltri̯‿in ˈspiːrito di fratelˈlant͡sa ‖]

Nobel Prizes for Italian language literature

{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders"

! scope="col" | Year

! scope="col" class="unsortable" | Image

! scope="col" | Laureate

! scope="col" | Born

! scope="col" class="unsortable" | Died

! scope="col" | Field

! scope="col" class="unsortable" | Rationale

| 1906

|frameless|upright=0.4|alt=Portrait of Giosuè Carducci

!scope="row"|

| in Valdicastello

| in Bologna

|Literature

|"not only in consideration of his deep learning and critical research, but above all as a tribute to the creative energy, freshness of style, and lyrical force which characterize his poetic masterpieces"

| 1926

|frameless|upright=0.4|alt=Portrait of Grazia Deledda

!scope="row"|

| in Nuoro (Sardinia)

| in Rome

|Literature

|"for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general"

| 1934

|frameless|upright=0.4|alt=Portrait of Luigi Pirandello

!scope="row"|

| in Agrigento

| in Rome

|Literature

|"for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art"

| 1959

|frameless|upright=0.4|alt=Portrait of Salvatore Quasimodo

!scope="row"|

| in Modica

| in Naples

|Literature

|"for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times"

| 1975

|frameless|upright=0.4|alt=Portrait of Eugenio Montale

!scope="row"|

| in Genoa

| in Milan

|Literature

|"for his distinctive poetry which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions"

| 1997

|frameless|upright=0.4|alt=Portrait of Dario Fo

!scope="row"|

| in Leggiuno-Sangiano

| in Milan

|Literature

|"who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden"

Notes

References

Bibliography

M. Vitale, Studi di Storia della Lingua Italiana, LED Edizioni Universitarie, Milano, 1992,
S. Morgana, Capitoli di Storia Linguistica Italiana, LED Edizioni Universitarie, Milano, 2003,
J. Kinder, CLIC: Cultura e Lingua d'Italia in CD-ROM / Culture and Language of Italy on CD-ROM, Interlinea, Novara, 2008,
(with a similar list of other Italian-modern languages dictionaries)

History

Renaissance

Modern era

Contemporary times

Classification

Geographic distribution

Education

Influence and derived languages

Lingua franca

Languages and dialects

Phonology

Evolution from Latin

Assimilation

Writing system

Common variations

Sounds

Vowels

Mobile diphthongs

Consonants

Grammar

Time

Example text

Nobel Prizes for Italian language literature

See also

Notes

References

Bibliography

External links