Italian language

• 1. Introduction

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  Italian almost did not exist as a spoken language. In 1861, when Italy unified, the linguist Tullio De Mauro estimated that only 2.5% of the population could speak standard Italian properly. The rest spoke their own city tongues, sister languages descended from spoken Latin, often unable to understand one another across regional lines. Today, between 68 and 85 million people speak Italian, with roughly 64 million native speakers as of 2024. So how did a refined version of the speech of one medieval city come to be understood across an entire peninsula and beyond it? Why do musicians around the world still borrow its words? And how did a poet writing in his native Florentine in the early 14th century quietly set the standard that would one day unite a nation that did not yet exist?

• 2. A City's Tongue

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  Dante Alighieri wrote his epic poems in his native Florentine, and his collected work, the Commedia, was read throughout the Italian peninsula. The later Tuscan poet Giovanni Boccaccio affixed the title Divina to it. Dante's written vernacular became the touchstone for a canonical standard that all educated Italians could understand. The poetry of Petrarch was also widely admired in the development of the literary language. In the 16th century Pietro Bembo would identify Petrarch as a model for vernacular writing.

  Florence itself gave the language weight beyond literature. The city sat linguistically between the northern and southern Italian dialects, a middle way that helped its speech travel. The economic might of Tuscany in the Late Middle Ages added prestige, and the rise of the Medici Bank, humanism, and the Renaissance turned a refined version of the Florentine dialect into a standard in the arts. Venetian still ran through medieval commercial life, and Ligurian, also called Genoese, stayed in use in Mediterranean maritime trade. Yet it was Florence whose tongue would be argued over for centuries to come.

• 3. The Question Of The Language

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  Questione della lingua, the problem of the language, was the name given to a debate that ran through Italian culture until the end of the 19th century. It was sparked in the 16th century by the rediscovery of Dante's De vulgari eloquentia and a renewed interest in linguistics. The argument was often linked to the political question of building a united Italian state.

  The purists, headed by the Venetian Pietro Bembo, argued in his Gli Asolani that the language should be based only on the great literary classics, such as Petrarch and parts of Boccaccio. They thought the Divine Comedy was not dignified enough because it drew on non-lyric registers. Niccolò Machiavelli and other Florentines preferred the version ordinary people spoke in their own time. The courtiers, including Baldassare Castiglione and Gian Giorgio Trissino, insisted each local vernacular contribute to the new standard. A fourth faction favored the papal court's mixture of Tuscan and Roman dialects. Bembo's ideas eventually prevailed. The Accademia della Crusca was founded in Florence in 1582-1583 as the official legislative body of the language, leading to Agnolo Monosini's Latin tome in 1604 and the first Italian dictionary in 1612.

• 4. Conservative By Nature

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  Almost all native Italian words end in vowels, a feature that sets the language apart from its Romance cousins. Italian is considered conservative in phonology, lexicon, and morphology, preserving many words nearly unchanged from Vulgar Latin. It has a seven-vowel system and 23 consonants, with the letters e and o each carrying mid-low and mid-high sounds. The language also contrasts short and long consonants and doubles, or geminates, them.

  This conservatism is partly explained by the language's origin. Italian stems from a literary language derived from the 13th-century speech of Florence, and has changed little in the last 700 years or so. The Tuscan dialect is itself the most conservative of all Italian dialects, radically different from the Gallo-Italian languages less than 100 miles to the north across the La Spezia-Rimini Line. 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 Classical Latin, after Logudorese Sardinian. Pei himself called it a very elementary, incomplete and tentative demonstration, assigning frankly arbitrary point values to types of change. According to Ethnologue, Italian shares 89% lexical similarity with French, 87% with Catalan, and 85% with Sardinian.

• 5. Sister Languages At Home

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  The label Italian dialects is, in the source's words, very misleading if it is understood to mean dialects of Italian. The Romance varieties spoken across Italy are local evolutions of spoken Latin that pre-date the establishment of Italian itself. They are sister languages to the Tuscan from which standard Italian derives, and some belong to entirely different branches of Romance. Italy has always had a distinctive vernacular for each city, because the cities were long thought of as city-states. Twelve groups are officially recognised by law as distinct minority languages.

  Regional Italian, the regional varieties of the standard, can be recognised by the openness of vowels and the length of consonants. A Roman pronounces va bene as vabˈbɛːne, a Milanese as vaˈbeːne. As literacy spread, the dialects declined. The percentage of literates in Italy rose from 25% in 1861 to 60% in 1911, then to 78.1% in 1951. By De Mauro's account the share who could speak standard Italian climbed to 87% by 1951, though most people, 63.5%, still usually spoke their native dialects. Diglossia is still frequently encountered in Italy, and triglossia is not uncommon among older speakers in emigrant communities.

• 6. Carried Across The World

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  Sicily became the first Italian land to adopt Occitan lyric moods in poetry after the Norman conquest of southern Italy. Centuries later the language would travel far further, carried by emigrants and by empire. 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.

  Those settlers left linguistic traces that still survive. In Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, a derived form of Venetian called Talian is used, as it is in the town of Chipilo near Puebla, Mexico. In Argentina and especially Buenos Aires, an Italian-Spanish pidgin called Cocoliche was once spoken, alongside Lunfardo. The Rioplatense Spanish of Argentina and Uruguay has been heavily influenced by both standard Italian and Italian regional languages as a result. Empire spread the language too. Italian was the official language of Eritrea during Italian colonisation, where the Italian Eritrean population grew from 4,000 during World War I to nearly 100,000 by the start of World War II. The capital, Asmara, still has Italian schools, including the Liceo Sperimentale G. Marconi.

• 7. Borders That Shifted

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  Until 1860, Italian was the official language in Savoy and in Nice, before both were annexed by France under the Treaty of Turin. The annexation triggered the Niçard exodus, the emigration of a quarter of the Niçard Italians to Italy, along with the Niçard Vespers. Giuseppe Garibaldi complained about the referendum that allowed France to annex Savoy and Nice, and some of his followers took refuge in Italy in the years after.

  Corsica tells a different story. The island passed from the Republic of Genoa to France in 1769 under the Treaty of Versailles, and Italian remained its official language until 1859. Garibaldi called for the Corsican Italians to be included within Italy, but King Victor Emmanuel II did not agree. Almost everyone on Corsica still speaks Corsican, an Italo-Romance language so close to Tuscan that it appears linguistically as an Italian dialect. In Malta, Italian served as the official language until 1934, when the British colonial administration abolished it amid strong local opposition. Today nearly two-thirds of the Maltese population can still speak it fluently. Italian was the official language of the Republic of Ragusa from 1492 to 1807.

• 8. Words The World Borrowed

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  Buon appetito, ciao, and grazie are among the everyday phrases Italian gave to the world, but its deepest export is the vocabulary of music. Numerous Italian words for music have become international terms taken into many languages, including English. Italian loanwords continue to appear in art and classical music, including opera, in design and fashion, in some sports, and especially in culinary terms.

  The language's reach was once a mark of education. A gentleman on the Grand Tour was expected to learn at least some Italian, understood as a language based on Florentine. In England, Italian became the second most common modern language after French, a position it held until the late 18th century, when German tended to replace it. The poet John Milton wrote some of his early poetry in Italian. The language is still studied widely today. As of 2022, Australia had the highest number of students learning Italian in the world. Six writers in the Italian language have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first in 1906 and the most recent in 1997, the latter honored for emulating the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.