The Italian Language

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The official language of Italy is Standard Italian - a direct descendant of Latin (some 75% of Italian words are of Latin origin).

VeniceMassimo d'Azeglio, one of Cavour's ministers, is said to have stated, following Italian unification, that having created Italy, all that remained was to create Italians.

Given the high number of languages spoken throughout the peninsula, it was quickly established that 'proper' or 'standard' Italian would be based on the Florentine dialect spoken in most of Tuscany (given that it was the first region to produce authors such as Dante Alighieri, who between 1308 and 1321 wrote the Divina Commedia). A national education system was established - leading to a decrease in variation in the languages spoken throughout the country over time. It was not until the 1960s, with the advent of the state television broadcaster, RAI, that Italian truly became broadly-known and quite standardised.

Today, Italian is fully comprehensible to all throughout the country, but regional variations in the form of accents and vowel emphasis persist. In addition, particular dialects have become cherished beacons of regional variation and are becoming recently more protected (especially the Neapolitan dialect which is extensively used for the singing of popular folk-songs).

Apart from standard Italian, regional variations and "dialects", a number of truly separate languages do exist. In the north, the province of South Tyrol (Südtirol in German, Alto Adige in Italian) is almost entirely German-speaking; the area was awarded to Italy following the First World War and her defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Pockets of German speakers also persist in other north-eastern Italian regions - a remnant of the old Austrian influence on this area of Italy. In total some 300,000 or so Italians speak German as their first language and indeed identify themselves as ethnic Austrians. Some 120,000 or so people live in the Aosta Valley region, where a dialect of Franco-Provençal is spoken that is similar to patois dialects spoken in France. About 1,400 people living in two isolated towns in Foggia speak another dialect of Franco-Provençal. About 80,000 Slovene-speakers live in the north-eastern region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia near the border with Slovenia. Some 40,000 Ladin-speakers (Ladin is a Rhaetian language spoken in the Dolomite mountains) also live in the Trentino-South Tyrol region and in the Veneto region. A very large community of some 700,000 people in Friuli speak Friulian - another Rhaetian language. In the Molise region of central-south Italy some 4,000 people (the Molise Croats) speak Serbo-Croatian - these are the descendants of a group of people who migrated from the Balkans in the Middle Ages. Scattered across Southern Italy are a number of some 30,000 Greek-speakers - considered to be the last surviving traces of the region's Greek heritage (Ancient Greek colonists reached Southern Italy and Sicily about 1500 BC), they speak a Greek dialect, Griko. Some 15,000 Catalan speakers reside around the area of Alghero in the north-west corner of Sardinia - believed to be the result of a migration of a large group of Catalans from Barcelona in ages past. Around 100,000 (the Arbëreshë) in Southern Italy and in central Sicily speak Albanian - the result of past migrations. Finally, the largest group of non-Italian speakers (some 1.6 million people) are those who speak Sardinian - a romance language whose written roots belong to the 2 millenniums BC and which evolved quite independently from Italian.

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