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115-721: The UniCredit Tower ( Italian : Torre UniCredit ) is a skyscraper in Milan , Italy. At 231 metres (758 ft), it is the tallest building in Italy . The Allianz Tower , at 209 m (686 ft), is still the tallest building in Italy if ranked by highest usable floor. The building is the headquarters of UniCredit , Italy's largest bank by assets, and is part of a larger development of new residential and business structures in Milan's Porta Nuova district, near Porta Garibaldi railway station , located at Piazza Gae Aulenti . The building

230-541: A continuum of languages and dialects characterized by similar phenomena that differ from others for these same phenomena. This imaginary line is used here to define not only a boundary between dialect groups, but also between Northern regional Italian on the one hand and Central and Southern regional Italian on the other. Other well-defined areas are the Tuscan, the Extreme Southern Italian (comprising

345-565: A huge number of civil servants and soldiers recruited from all over the country introduced many more words and idioms from their home languages— ciao is derived from the Venetian word s-cia[v]o ("slave", that is "your servant"), panettone comes from the Lombard word panetton , etc. Only 2.5% of Italy's population could speak the Italian standardized language properly when

460-452: A literary and prestigious means of expression across the whole peninsula, Sicily and Corsica in the late Middle Ages ; on the other hand, it would be introduced to Sardinia by a specific order only in the second half of the 18th century (1760), when the island's ownership passed over to the House of Savoy . It was up to Pietro Bembo , a Venetian, to identify Florentine as the language for

575-471: A little over one million people in the United States speak Italian at home. 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

690-657: A local vernacular. These dialects, as they are commonly referred to, evolved from Vulgar Latin over the course of centuries, unaffected by formal standards and teachings. They are not in any sense "dialects" of standard Italian, which itself started off as one of these local tongues, but sister languages of Italian. Mutual intelligibility with Italian varies widely, as it does with Romance languages in general. The Romance languages of Italy can differ greatly from Italian at all levels ( phonology , morphology , syntax , lexicon , pragmatics ) and are classified typologically as distinct languages. The standard Italian language has

805-658: A poetic and literary origin in the works of Tuscan writers of the 12th century, and, although the grammar and core lexicon are basically unchanged from those used in Florence in the 13th century, the modern standard of the language was largely shaped by relatively recent events. However, Romance vernacular as language spoken in the Italian Peninsula has a longer history. In fact, the earliest surviving texts that can definitely be called vernacular (as distinct from its predecessor Vulgar Latin) are legal formulae known as

920-443: A product of standard Italian mixing with the regional languages, were also born. The various regional languages would be retained by the population as their normal means of expression until the 1950s, when breakthroughs in literacy and the advent of TV broadcasting made Italian become more and more widespread, usually in its regional varieties. Establishing precise boundaries is very difficult in linguistics, and this operation at

1035-417: 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

1150-575: A result. 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

1265-447: A seven-vowel system, consisting of /a, ɛ, e, i, ɔ, o, u/ , as well as 23 consonants. Compared with most other Romance languages, Italian phonology is conservative, preserving many words nearly unchanged from Vulgar Latin . Some examples: Regional Italian Such vernacular varieties and standard Italian exist along a sociolect continuum , and are not to be confused with the local non-immigrant languages of Italy that predate

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1380-498: A significant number of Sardinian and other local loanwords (be they Italianised or not) are also present in regional varieties of Italian (e.g. porcetto from the Sardinian porcheddu / porceddu , scacciacqua from the Sardinian parabba / paracua "raincoat", continente "Mainland" and continentale "Mainlander" with reference to the rest of the country and its people as well, etc.). Some words may even reflect ignorance of

1495-479: 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 can understand each other well if they choose to do so; however, the level of intelligibility

1610-485: A spoken language was born in two "linguistic labs" consisting of the metropolitan areas in Milan and Rome , which functioned as magnets for internal migration. Immigrants were only left with the national language as a lingua franca to communicate with both the locals and other immigrants. After unification, Italian started to be taught at primary schools and its use by ordinary people increased considerably, along with mass literacy . The regional varieties of Italian, as

1725-513: A united Italian state. Renaissance scholars divided into three main factions: 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 Accademia della Crusca in Florence (1582–1583), the official legislative body of the Italian language, led to

1840-427: Is 89% with French, 87% with Catalan , 85% with Sardinian , 82% with Spanish, 80% with Portuguese , 78% with Ladin , 77% with Romanian . Estimates may differ according to sources. One study, analyzing the degree of differentiation of Romance languages in comparison to Latin (comparing phonology , inflection , discourse , syntax , vocabulary , and intonation ), estimated that distance between Italian and Latin

1955-691: Is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire . Italian is the least divergent language from Latin , together with Sardinian (meaning that Italian and Sardinian are the most conservative Romance languages). Spoken by about 85 million people, including 67 million native speakers (2024), Italian is an official language in Italy , San Marino , Switzerland ( Ticino and

2070-523: Is a different distribution of closed and open vowels (The pronunciation "giòrno" with an open o is very widespread in Campania for example), while in Calabria, Salento and Sicily closed vowels are completely missing and speakers just pronounce open vowels ( [ɛ, ɔ] ), while in the other regions the discrepancies with the pronunciation Standards are minor (albeit relevant) and non-homogeneous; on

2185-455: Is a tendency to close all the e even where the Italian standard does not envisage it. In Genoa and Bologna for example the names Mattèo , Irène , Emanuèle and the name of the city itself are pronounced with the closed e ; moreover, there is no difference in the pronunciation of the word pesca either to mean "peach" (standard [ˈpɛska] ) and "fishing" (standard [ˈpeska] ), both pronounced [ˈpeska] . There

2300-541: Is also a strong tendency to pronounce all the e's before a nasal consonant as closed (usually when the nasal consonant is in the same syllable of the e) so that /ɛ/ becomes /e/. Sempre (always) is pronounced as [ˈsempre] in Northern Italy while the standard pronunciation is [ˈsɛmpre] , The only exceptions being the words that end in -enne and -emme A characteristic of the North in opposition to

2415-759: Is also spoken by a minority in Monaco and France, especially in the southeastern part of the country. Italian was the official language in Savoy and in Nice until 1860, when they were both annexed by France under the Treaty of Turin , a development that triggered the " Niçard exodus ", or the emigration of a quarter of the Niçard Italians to Italy, and the Niçard Vespers . Giuseppe Garibaldi complained about

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2530-534: Is higher than that between Sardinian and Latin. In particular, its vowels are the second-closest to Latin after Sardinian . As in most Romance languages, stress is distinctive. 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 ), although its use there has moderately declined since

2645-460: 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

2760-504: Is neither a co-official nor a protected language in these countries. 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. 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

2875-410: 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 ninth and tenth centuries C.E. 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

2990-512: Is not present in the majority of Gallo-italic languages (they are replaced by the present perfect). Sometimes, for older speakers, northern varieties lack geminated consonants (see gemination ), especially in Veneto . The lack of the gemination standardly found in combinations of prepositions + articles (e.g. alla, dello, sull' etc.) is very widespread in casual speech, resulting in "sull'albero" sounding like [suˈlalbero] in contrast with

3105-553: Is pronounced [ˈluːʃe] rather than [ˈluːtʃe] , la cena is pronounced [la ˈʃeːna] instead of [la ˈtʃeːna] as it is pronounced in northern Italy and in standard Italian. Based on the significant linguistic distance between the Sardinian language (and any other traditionally spoken by the islanders ) and Italian, the Sardinian-influenced Italian emerging from

3220-501: Is similar to the German use of ja... schon especially for ironic purposes, in order to convey sardonic remarks (e.g. Già sei tutto studiato, tu! "You're so well educated!" from Jai ses totu istudiatu, tue! which roughly stands for "You are so ignorant and full of yourself!", or Già è poco bello! "He/It is not so beautiful!" from Jai est pacu bellu! meaning actually "He/It is so beautiful!"). One also needs to take into consideration

3335-648: Is the main working language of the Holy See , serving as the lingua franca (common language) in the Roman Catholic hierarchy as well as the official language of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta . Italian 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. Almost all native Italian words end with vowels , and

3450-715: Is the pronunciation of the suffix -ano for conjugating a first conjugation verb (-are) to a third plural person (they), which most of the times is phonetically realized as [-ɐno] Widespread use of determiners before feminine names ( la Giulia ) is also noted in almost all the north while the determiner coupled with male names ( il Carlo ) is typical of the Po Valley . In the northern vocabulary words like anguria (also common in Sardinia and Sicily), which means " watermelon ", instead of cocomero , bologna for mortadella (but not everywhere), piuttosto che ("rather than") in

3565-557: Is the use of the article before a female given name ( la Elena , la Giulia ); such use passed from Tuscany to other regions when used before the surname of well-known people, particularly of the past ( il Manzoni ). In the vocabulary there is the use of spenge instead of spegne ("extinguishes") or words like balocco instead of giocattolo ("toy"), busse instead of percosse or botte ("beatings"), rena instead of sabbia ("sand"), cencio instead of panno ("cloth"). The Tuscan historical dialects (including Corsican ) belong to

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3680-549: 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

3795-509: The Il Globo (Australia) and the La gazzetta del Sud Africa (South Africa). Italian is widely taught in many schools around the world, but rarely as the first foreign language. 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,

3910-991: The La Voce del Popolo ( Croatia ), the Corriere d'Italia (Germany), the L'italoeuropeo (United Kingdom), the Passaparola ( Luxembourg ), the America Oggi (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 ),

4025-584: The Austrian Empire ) between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and its unification in 1861 played a considerable role in further jeopardizing the linguistic situation. When the unification process took place, the newly founded country used Italian mainly as a literary language. Many Romance and non-Romance regional languages were spoken throughout the Italian Peninsula and the islands, each with their own local dialects. Italian as

4140-702: 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

4255-852: The Grisons ), Corsica , and Vatican City . It has official minority status in Croatia , Slovenian Istria , and the municipalities of Santa Tereza and Encantado in Brazil . Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia . Italian is included under the languages covered by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Romania , although Italian

4370-674: The Kingdom of Italy in the Dodecanese ). Italian is widely spoken in Malta , where nearly two-thirds of the population can speak it fluently (see Maltese Italian ). 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 recognized minority language in

4485-773: 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

4600-554: 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 is also a similar case. The Italian language has progressed through a long and slow process, which started after

4715-459: The Teramo area (northern Abruzzo), and up to Pescara, the vowels are pronounced with a single open sound (for example dove volete andare stasera? [ˈdɔːvɛ vɔˈlɛːtɛ anˈdaːrɛ staˈsɛːra] , Thus showing an inexplicable coincidence with the phonetic outcomes of Sicily and Calabria, although there is no direct link with them. As already mentioned here, the intervocalic s is always voiceless, and

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4830-457: The Western Roman Empire's fall in the 5th century. 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

4945-475: The contact between such languages is to be considered an ethnolect and sociolect of its own, as features divergent from Italian are local in origin, not attributable to more widespread Northern or Southern Italian varieties. While Sardinian phonetics and the introduction of Sardinian words in a full Italian conversation are prevalent, especially if they are Italianised in the process (e.g. tzurpu "blind" and scimpru "dumb" becoming ciurpo and scimpro ),

5060-532: 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. From

5175-510: 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

5290-562: The 1970s. It is official both on the national level and on regional level in two cantons : Ticino and Grisons . In the latter canton, however, it is only spoken by a small minority, in the Italian 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

5405-499: The Adriatic side is more evident, as in certain areas of central-east Abruzzo (Chieti-Sulmona), largely in central-northern Apulia (Foggia-Bari-Taranto), and in eastern Basilicata (Matera) where it is present The so-called "syllabic isocronism": free syllable vowels are all pronounced closed and those in close syllables all open (see the well-known example un póco di pòllo instead of un pòco di póllo "a bit of chicken"); Even in

5520-641: The Christmas season of 2013 it was lit up green to represent a Christmas tree, while on the night between 14 and 15 June 2014 it was illuminated in red to celebrate the 150 year anniversary of the Italian Red Cross . One of the usual displays is that of the Italian flag . On the evening of 14 November 2015, the spire was illuminated with the colors of the French flag to represent Italy's condolences for

5635-417: 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 . Notes: Italian has

5750-489: The Italian language into a lingua franca used not only among clerks, nobility, and functionaries in the Italian courts but also by the bourgeoisie . Italian literature's first modern novel, I promessi sposi ( The Betrothed ) by Alessandro Manzoni , 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. After unification,

5865-556: 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. 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). During this time, long-existing beliefs stemming from

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5980-602: The Sardinian Essinde ses? , instead of Stai uscendo? ; Studiando stavo! "Been studying have I!", from Istudiende fia! , instead of Stavo studiando! ; Legna vi serve? "In need of some wood are you?" from Linna bos serbit? , instead of Avete bisogno di un po' di legna? ). It is also common for interrogative sentences to use a pleonastic tutto "all", from the Sardinian totu , as in Cosa tutto hai visto? "What all have you seen?" from Ite totu as bidu? compared with

6095-459: The South is the almost always voiced ( [z] ) consonant in intervocalic position, whereas in the south it is always voiceless: [ˈkɔːza] vs. [ˈkɔːsa] . Also in opposition to the south, the north is characterized by the reduction of phonosyntactic doubling at the beginning of the word (after vowels) and the almost total abandonment of the preterite tense in verb forms as it

6210-437: The beginning of the word if the previous word ends up by vowel: la casa "the house" [la ˈhaːsa] , even to its total disappearance. Also phonological in nature are forms without the diphthong uo of Standard Italian ( ova , scola , bona , foco instead of uova , scuola , buona , fuoco ), while in the syntax a tripartite system of demonstrative adjectives is in use: questo ("this") to indicate something close to

6325-440: The capital's dialect) was a very lively language, spoken by ordinary people in the city's streets. On the other hand, the only Italian city where even the commoners spoke something similar to literary Italian was Florence, so he thought that Italians should choose Florentine as the basis for the national language. The Italian Peninsula's history of fragmentation and colonization by foreign powers (especially France , Spain and

6440-444: 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

6555-653: 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 Italian School of Asmara (Italian primary school with a Montessori department) and the Liceo Sperimentale "G. Marconi" (Italian international senior high school). Italian

6670-405: The country (some 0.42% of the total population). 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. It formerly had official status in Albania due to the annexation of

6785-408: 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 Albanian government has pushed to make Italian a compulsory second language in schools. The Italian language is well-known and studied in Albania, due to its historical ties and geographical proximity to Italy and to

6900-402: The country. Sardinianised Italian is marked by the prevalence, even in common speech, of the verb's inversion, following rules of Sardinian (and Latin) but not Italian, which uses a subject-verb-object structure. The (often auxiliary) verb usually ends up at the end of the sentence, especially in exclamatory and interrogative sentences (e.g. Uscendo stai? , literally "Going out are you?", from

7015-446: The country. 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

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7130-415: 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. The 2001 census in Croatia reported 19,636 ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians ) in

7245-464: The design and fashion industries, in some sports such as football and especially in culinary terms. 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

7360-420: 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. Although it was the primary language in Libya since colonial rule , Italian greatly declined under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi , who expelled the Italian Libyan population and made Arabic the sole official language of

7475-436: The doubling of the g 's and b 's ( abile [ˈabbile] instead of [ˈaːbile] , regina [redˈdʒiːna] instead of [reˈdʒiːna] ). A popular trait in the everyday southern speech is the usage of the apocope of the final syllable of the words, ( ma' for mamma "mom", professo' for professore "professor", compa' for compare "buddy, homie" etc.). In continental Southern Italy there

7590-420: 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

7705-409: 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 recognized as distinct minority languages by

7820-433: The fact that it was linguistically an intermediate between the northern and the southern Italian dialects. Thus the dialect of Florence became the basis for what would become the official language of Italy. 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

7935-410: 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

8050-423: The idea of an action ongoing at a certain point, but rather something that will take place in the very near future, almost on the point of happening (e.g. Sto andando a scuola with the meaning of "I'm about to go to school" rather than "Right now as we speak, I'm going to school"). It is also common to use antiphrastic formulas which are alien to Italian, by means of the particle già (Sard. jai / giai ) which

8165-431: 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 De vulgari eloquentia , as well as

8280-577: 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. During the Middle Ages , the established written language in Europe was Latin, although the great majority of people were illiterate, and only few were well versed in the language. In the Italian Peninsula , as in most of Europe, most would instead speak

8395-588: 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 as well as in the South. In Venezuela , Italian is the most spoken language after Spanish and Portuguese, with around 200,000 speakers. In Uruguay , people who speak Italian as their home language are 1.1% of

8510-498: 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

8625-534: The late 19th to the mid-20th century, millions of Italians settled in Argentina, Uruguay, Southern Brazil and Venezuela, as well as 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

8740-567: 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

8855-514: The limit can be accomplished for individual phenomena (such as the realization of a sound), but not for all of them: it is necessary to proceed in part by abstractions. In general, an isogloss is an imaginary line that marks the boundary of a linguistic phenomenon. The line traditionally referred to as La Spezia-Rimini (though it is currently moving to the Massa-Senigallia line) is an important isogloss for Southern Europe, which delimits

8970-412: The nation was unified in 1861. 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 . According to Ethnologue , lexical similarity

9085-447: The national tongue or any regional variety thereof. Among these languages, the various Tuscan , Corsican and some Central Italian lects are, to some extent, the closest ones to standard Italian in terms of linguistic features, since the latter is based on a somewhat polished form of Florentine . The various forms of Regional Italian have phonological, morphological , syntactic , prosodic and lexical features which originate from

9200-408: The number of printing presses in Italy grew rapidly and by the year 1500 reached a total of 56, the biggest number of printing presses in all of Europe. This enabled the production of more pieces of literature at a lower cost and Italian, as the dominant language, spread. Italian became the language used in the courts of every state in the Italian Peninsula , as well as the prestige variety used on

9315-741: The official language of the Roman Empire . Even though the Sicilian School , using the Sicilian language , had been prominent earlier, by the 14th century the Tuscan dialect of Florence had gained prestige once Dante Alighieri , Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) and Giovanni Boccaccio all wrote major works in it: the Divine Comedy , the Canzoniere and the Decameron . Italian, defined as such, began to spread and be used as

9430-475: The open e is pronounced at the end of the word ( perché [perˈkɛ] ) or in the word body in closed syllable (i.e. followed by consonant: stesso [ˈstɛsso] ) and the closed e in word body in open syllable (i.e. not followed by consonant: bene [ˈbeːne] ). Except for the extreme Ligurian Levante , in Liguria , and especially in the capital, there is the opposite phenomenon: there

9545-630: The openness of vowels, the length of the consonants, and influence of the local language (for example, in informal situations andà , annà and nare replace the standard Italian andare 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

9660-584: 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 recognized by various factors:

9775-488: The original language on the speaker's part when referring to a singular noun in Italian with Sardinian plurals, due to a lack of understanding of how singular and plurals nouns are formed in Sardinian: common mistakes are "una seada s ", "un tenore s ", etc. Regarding phonology, the regional Italian spoken in Sardinia follows the same five-vowel system of the Sardinian language without length differentiation, rather than

9890-458: The other hand, almost everyone still speaks the Corsican idiom , 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

10005-692: The peninsula in the Prose nelle quali si ragiona della volgar lingua (1525), in which he set up Petrarch as the perfect model. Italian, however, was a literary language and so was a written rather than spoken language, except in Tuscany and Corsica. The popular diffusion of a unified Italian language was the main goal of Alessandro Manzoni , who advocated for a single national language mainly derived from "cultured" Florentine language. Having lived in Paris for many years, Manzoni had noticed that French (defined as

10120-463: The peninsular part of Calabria , Salento and Sicily ), and finally the Sardinian ones. Based on borders like La Spezia-Rimini, here are the most well-identified groups of regional Italian. Northern regional Italian is characterized by a different distribution of the open and closed e and o ( [e, ɛ, o, ɔ] ) compared to the Florentine model, particularly evident in Milan , where

10235-406: 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 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

10350-723: The presence of a number of other Sardinian-specific idiomatic phrases being literally translated into Italian (like Cosa sembra? "What does it look like?" from Ite paret? meaning "How do you do?" compared to the standard Italian Come stai? , Mi dice sempre cosa! "She/He's always scolding me!" from the Sardinian Semper cosa mi narat! compared to the standard Italian Mi rimprovera sempre! , or again Non fa! "No chance!" from Non fachet! / Non fait! compared to standard Italian Non si può! ), that would make little sense to an Italian speaker from another region. As mentioned earlier,

10465-469: 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

10580-528: 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, [aˈkaːza] for Milanese and generally northern. In contrast to

10695-415: The publication of Agnolo Monosini 's Latin tome Floris italicae linguae libri novem in 1604 followed by the first Italian dictionary in 1612. An important event that helped the diffusion of Italian was the conquest and occupation of Italy by Napoleon in the early 19th century (who was himself of Italian-Corsican descent). This conquest propelled the unification of Italy some decades after and pushed

10810-542: 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

10925-491: The regional Italian of Veneto, the same expression would be stémo rivando or siamo dietro ad arrivare . The same relationship holds throughout the rest of Italy: the local version of standard Italian is usually influenced by the underlying local language, which can be very different from Italian with regard to phonology , morphology , syntax , and vocabulary . Anyone who knows Standard Italian well can usually understand Regional Italian quite well, while not managing to grasp

11040-484: The regional Sardinian variety of Italian embracing the most diverging syntactic and morphological changes is situated at the low end of the diastratic spectrum, and its usage, though relatively common among the less educated, is not positively valued by either bilingual Sardinian speakers, who regard it as neither Sardinian nor Italian and nickname it italianu porcheddìnu ("piggy Italian", standing for "broken Italian"), or Italian monolinguals from Sardinia and other parts of

11155-689: The regional languages. Many contemporary Italian regions already had different substrates before the conquest of Italy and the islands by the ancient Romans: Northern Italy had a Ligurian , a Venetic , a Rhaetic and a Celtic substrate in the areas once known as Cisalpine Gaul ("Gaul on this side of the Alps"); Central Italy had an Umbrian and Etruscan substrate; Southern Italy and Sicily had an Oscan and Italic - Greek substrate respectively; and finally, Sardinia had an indigenous ( Nuragic ) and Punic substrate. These languages in their respective territories contributed in creolising Latin,

11270-534: The same linguistic system as Italian, with few substantial morphological, syntactic or lexical differences compared to the standard language. As a result, unlike further from Tuscany in Italy, there are no major obstacles to mutual intelligibility of the local Romance languages and Regional Italian. Central and Southern regional Italian is characterized by the usage of the affricate consonants in place of fricatives after nasal consonants ( insolito [inˈtsɔːlito] instead of [inˈsɔːlito] ), and by

11385-488: The sense of "or" and not "instead", etc. are in use. The last, in particular, is a custom that has begun to spread also in other areas of Italy, stirring up linguistic concern, as it is used with a semantic sense in contrast to that of standard Italian. In Tuscany and especially in Florence , the Tuscan gorgia is very well known. That is, the lenition of the occlusive consonants in the post-vocalic position, including at

11500-578: The speaker (first person), codesto (lost in other varieties) for something close to the contact person (second person), or quello "that" for something far from both (third person). A Tuscan stereotype is use of forms resembling the impersonal for the first person plural: (noi) si va instead of noi andiamo ("we are going"), past tense (noi) si è andati , and use of te rather than tu as second person singular subject pronoun: Te che fai stasera? rather than Tu che fai stasera? ("What are you doing tonight?"). Also typical of several areas including Tuscany

11615-486: The standard Italian Cosa hai visto? . The present continuous makes use of the verb essere "to be" as in English rather than stare (e.g. Sempre andando e venendo è! "Always walking up and down she/he is!" from Semper/Sempri andande e beninde est! compared with the standard Italian Sta sempre andando e venendo! ): that is because the present continuous built with verb stare does not, in such regional variety, express

11730-440: The standard Italian seven-vowel system. Metaphony has also been observed: tonic e and o ( [e, o] ) have a closed sound whenever they are followed by a closed vowel ( i , u ), and they have it open if they are followed by an open one ( a , e , o ). Hypercorrection is also common when applying the Italian rule of syntactic gemination ; intervocalic t , p , v , c are usually elongated. Intervocalic /s/ voicing

11845-752: The standard pronunciation [sulˈlalbero] . The consonants /ʃ, tʃ, dʒ/ are labialized in standard Italian ([ʃʷ, tʃʷ, dʒʷ]), but in northern varieties they're not. Final N's (even though they're not usually found in words with an Italian origin) are usually pronounced as velars in northern varieties, so the typical Venetian surname "Martin" is pronounced as [marˈtiŋ] in Northern Italy but [marˈtin] in Central and Southern Italy. In some cases, certain unstressed vowels may be pronounced more subtly or reduced in Northern Italian varieties compared to standard Italian. One example

11960-473: The teachings of the Roman Catholic Church began to be understood from new perspectives as humanists —individuals who placed emphasis on the human body and its full potential—began to shift focus from the church to human beings themselves. The continual advancements in technology play a crucial role in the diffusion of languages. After the invention of the printing press in the 15th century,

12075-410: The title Divina , were read throughout the peninsula and his written dialect became the "canonical standard" that all educated Italians could understand. Dante is still credited with standardizing the Italian language. In addition to the widespread exposure gained through literature, the Florentine dialect also gained prestige due to the political and cultural significance of Florence at the time and

12190-542: 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 ),

12305-479: The underlying substrate of the original language of the locale. The difference between Regional Italian and the actual languages of Italy , often imprecisely referred to as dialects , is exemplified by the following: in Venetian , the language spoken in Veneto , "we are arriving" would be translated into sémo drio rivàr , which is quite distinct from the Standard Italian stiamo arrivando . In

12420-505: The use of the preterite is also frequent instead of the use of the present perfect . In continental southern Italy, from Rome down to Calabria, possessive pronouns often are placed after the noun: for example il libro mio instead of il mio libro ("my book"). Another characteristic of regional Italian varieties in central and southern Italy is deaffrication of /tʃ/ between vowels, both word-internally and across word boundaries. In almost all peninsular Italy from Tuscany to Sicily luce

12535-625: The victims of the attack at Stade de France and at the Bataclan theatre in Paris, which had occurred the night before. On 13 June 2016, the tower was lit up with the colours of the rainbow flag in acknowledgement of the 49 victims of the Orlando nightclub shooting in Florida. Italian language Italian ( italiano , pronounced [itaˈljaːno] , or lingua italiana , pronounced [ˈliŋɡwa itaˈljaːna] )

12650-659: 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 13.4 million EU citizens (3%). Including Italian speakers in non-EU European countries (such as Switzerland, Albania and the United Kingdom ) and on other continents, the total number of speakers is approximately 85 million. Italian

12765-561: 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 . Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia. Although over 17 million Americans are of Italian descent , only

12880-525: 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 idiom 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

12995-510: Was designed by architect César Pelli and reached its full height on 15 October 2011 when the spire was attached. The tower ranked eighth in the Emporis 2012, that rewards skyscrapers for excellence in their aesthetic and functional design. The spire has a height of around 80.5 metres and is entirely covered with LED lights, with the spire also having continuous night lighting. The colours can be varied according to event. For example, during

13110-443: 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

13225-658: 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) . It formerly had official status in Montenegro (because of the Venetian Albania ), parts of Slovenia and Croatia (because of the Venetian Istria and Venetian Dalmatia ), parts of Greece (because of the Venetian rule in the Ionian Islands and by

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