Italian (italiano, , or lingua italiana, ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family. It evolved from the colloquial Latin of the Roman Empire,
Italian is an official language in Italy, San Marino, Switzerland (Ticino and the Italian Grisons), and Vatican City, and it has official minority status in Croatia, Slovenia (Slovene Istria), Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and in 6 municipalities of Brazil. It is also spoken in other European and non-EU countries, most notably in Maltese Italian (by 66% of the population), Albania and Monaco, as well as by large Italian diaspora in the Americas, Australia and on other continents.
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 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 million EU citizens (3%). Europeans and their Languages , Data for EU27 , published in 2012. 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 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. Almost all native Italian words end with , 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 Consonant length and gemination (doubling) of consonants.
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 of Italian.
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.D'Antoni, Francesca Guerra. "A New Perspective on the Veronese Riddle"
/ref> 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.
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 Divine Comedy, 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 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 Rome Italian and Italian are syntactic gemination of initial 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 language influences introduced to Italy mainly by 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.
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 CorsicaToso, Fiorenzo. Lo spazio linguistico corso tra insularità e destino di frontiera, in Linguistica, 43, pp. 79–80, 2003. (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 sphereCardia, Amos. S'italianu in Sardìnnia candu, cumenti e poita d'ant impostu: 1720–1848; poderi e lìngua in Sardìnnia in edadi spanniola, pp. 80–93, Iskra, 2006.«La dominazione sabauda in Sardegna può essere considerata come la fase iniziale di un lungo processo di italianizzazione dell'isola, con la capillare diffusione dell'italiano in quanto strumento per il superamento della frammentarietà tipica del contesto linguistico dell'isola e con il conseguente inserimento delle sue strutture economiche e culturali in un contesto internazionale più ampio e aperto ai contatti di più lato respiro. ... Proprio la variegata composizione linguistica della Sardegna fu considerata negativamente per qualunque tentativo di assorbimento dell'isola nella sfera culturale italiana.» Loi Corvetto, Ines. I Savoia e le "vie" dell'unificazione linguistica. Quoted in Putzu, Ignazio; Mazzon, Gabriella (2012). Lingue, letterature, nazioni. Centri e periferie tra Europa e Mediterraneo, p. 488.). The rediscovery of Dante's De vulgari eloquentia, 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:
A fourth faction claimed that the best Italian was the one that the papal court adopted, which was a mixture of the Tuscan dialect and Roman dialect dialects.This faction was headed by Vincenzo Calmeta, Alessandro Tassoni, according to whom "the idiom of the Roman court was as good as the Florentine one, and better understood by all" (G. Rossi, ed. (1930). La secchia rapita, L'oceano e le rime. Bari. p. 235) and Francesco Sforza Pallavicino. See:
Eventually, Bembo's ideas prevailed, and the foundation of the italic=no in Florence (1582–1583), the official legislative body of the Italian language, led to the publication of Agnolo Monosini's Latin tome Floris italicae linguae libri novem in 1604 followed by the first Italian dictionary in 1612.
This growth was relative; linguistic diversity continued during the unification of Italy (1848–1871). The Italian linguist Tullio De Mauro estimated that only 2.5% of Italy's population could speak the Italian standardized language properly in 1861,De Mauro, Tullio. Storia linguistica dell'Italia unita. Bari: Laterza, 1963. while Arrigo Castellani estimated the same value as 10%.Colombo, Michele, and John J. Kinder. "Italian as a Language of Communication in Nineteenth Century Italy and Abroad". Italica 89, no. 1 (2012): 109–21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41440499. ("De Mauro started from the principle that only the inhabitants of Tuscany and Rome could easily speak the common (literary) language without a great amount of schooling, because their dialects were close to Italian. For all other Italians, it is reasonable to assume that only those who had attended at least some years of the secondary school were able to speak Italian. Given these assumptions, De Mauro (34-43) estimated that, in 1861, only 630,000 citizens, in a population of more than 25 million inhabitants, were speakers of the national language: that is, in the united Italy of the nineteenth century only 2.5% of the population was able to speak Italian. Some years later, Arrigo Castellani adjusted the percentage, arguing on the basis of new criteria that almost one-tenth of Italians spoke Italian as their everyday language in 1861.")
After unification, a huge number of civil servants and soldiers recruited from all over the country introduced many more words and idioms from their home languages. For example, ciao is derived from the Venetian word s-ciavo ('slave', that is 'your servant'), and panettone comes from the Lombard language word panetton.
According to Ethnologue, lexical similarity is 89% with French, 87% with Catalan language, 85% with Sardinian, 82% with Spanish, 82% with Portuguese, 78% with Ladin language, 77% with Romanian. Estimates may differ according to sources.
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 Vulgar Latin (after 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. Demonstrates a comparative statistical method for determining the extent of change from the Latin for the free and checked stressed vowels of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Rumanian, Old Provençal, and Logudorese Sardinian. By assigning 3½ change points per vowel (with 2 points for diphthongization, 1 point for modification in vowel quantity, ½ point for changes due to nasalization, palatalization or umlaut, and −½ point for failure to effect a normal change), there is a maximum of 77 change points for free and checked stressed vowel sounds (11×2×3½=77). According to this system (illustrated by seven charts at the end of the article), the percentage of change is greatest in French (44%) and least in Italian (12%) and Sardinian (8%). Prof. Pei suggests that this statistical method could be extended not only to all other phonological but also to all morphological and syntactical phenomena.See : "In the late forties and in the fifties some new proposals for classification of the Romance languages appeared. A statistical method attempting to evaluate the evidence quantitatively was developed in order to provide not only a classification but at the same time a measure of the divergence among the languages. The earliest attempt was made in 1949 by Mario Pei (1901–1978), who measured the divergence of seven modern Romance languages from Classical Latin, taking as his criterion the evolution of stressed vowels. Pei's results do not show the degree of contemporary divergence among the languages from each other but only the divergence of each one from Classical Latin. The closest language turned out to be Sardinian with 8% of change. Then followed Italian — 12%; Spanish — 20%; Romanian — 23,5%; Provençal — 25%; Portuguese — 31%; French — 44%."
Italian 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 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.Abalain, Hervé, (2007) Le français et les langues historiques de la France, Éditions Jean-Paul Gisserot, p.113 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).
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 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.Hull, Geoffrey, The Malta Language Question: A Case Study in Cultural Imperialism, Valletta: Said International, 1993. 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. The 2001 census in Croatia reported 19,636 ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians) in 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 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.Zonova, Tatiana. "The Italian language: soft power or dolce potere?." Rivista di Studi Politici Internazionali (2013): 227–231. 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 the diffusion of Italian television in the country.
Due to heavy Italian influence during the Italian Empire, Italian is still understood by some in former colonies such as Libya. Although it was the primary language in Libya since Italian Libya, Italian greatly declined under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi, who expelled the Italian Libyan population and made Arabic the sole official language of the country.[3] A few hundred Italian settlers returned to Libya in the 2000s.
Italian was the official language of Eritrea during Italian Eritrea. 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.
Italian is also spoken by large Italian diaspora in the Americas and Australia. Although over 17 million Italian American, only 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 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 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 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 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), the Il Globo (Australia) and the La gazzetta del Sud Africa (South Africa).
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.
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 dialect 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.
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 language 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 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.
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.
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 Regional Italian, 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 language). Some of these features are also present in Romanian.
Compared with most other Romance languages, Italian has many inconsistent outcomes, where the same underlying sound produces different results in different words, e.g. laxāre > lasciare and lassare, captiāre > cacciare and cazzare, (ex)dēroteolāre > sdrucciolare, druzzolare and ruzzolare, rēgīna > 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 lŏcvm > luogo but fŏcvm > 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:
Standard Italian also differs in some respects from most nearby Italian languages:
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 .
! ! colspan="2" Before back vowel (A, O, U) ! colspan="2" | Before front vowel (I, E) |
Italian has geminate, or double, consonants, which are distinguished by Consonant 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 . 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'.
There are two basic classes of nouns in Italian, referred to as genders, masculine and feminine. Gender may be Natural gender ( 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 Animacy. 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.
Son | Masculine | Figlio | Figli |
House | Feminine | Casa | Case |
Love | Masculine | Amore | Amori |
Art | Feminine | Arte | Arti |
Like in English, common nouns are capitalized when occurring at the beginning of a sentence. Unlike English, nouns referring to languages (e.g. Italian) and adjectives pertaining to ethnicity are never capitalized, while speakers of languages, or inhabitants of an area (e.g. Italians) used to always be capitalized, but, starting from the 19th century, this convention has been subject to various changes.
There are three types of : descriptive, invariable and form-changing. Descriptive adjectives are the most common, and their endings change to match the number and gender of the noun they modify. Invariable adjectives are adjectives whose endings do not change. The form-changing adjectives buono 'good', bello 'beautiful', grande 'big', and santo 'saint/holy' change in form when placed before different types of nouns. Italian has three degrees for comparison of adjectives: positive, comparative, and superlative.
The order of words in the phrase is relatively free compared to most European languages. The position of the verb in the phrase is highly mobile. Word order often has a lesser grammatical function in Italian than in English. Adjectives are sometimes placed before their noun and sometimes after. Subject nouns generally come before the verb. Italian is a null-subject language, so nominative pronouns are usually absent, with subject indicated by verbal (e.g. amo 'I love', ama '(s)he loves', amano 'they love'). Noun objects normally come after the verb, as do pronoun objects after imperative verbs, infinitives and gerunds, but otherwise, pronoun objects come before the verb.
There are both indefinite and definite articles in Italian. There are four indefinite articles, selected by the gender of the noun they modify and by the phonological structure of the word that immediately follows the article. Uno is masculine singular, used before z ( or ), s+consonant, gn (), pn or ps, while masculine singular un is used before a word beginning with any other sound. The noun zio 'uncle' selects masculine singular, thus uno zio 'an uncle' or uno zio anziano 'an old uncle,' but un mio zio 'an uncle of mine'. The feminine singular indefinite articles are una, used before any consonant sound, and its abbreviated form, written un', used before vowels: una camicia 'a shirt', una camicia bianca 'a white shirt', un'altra camicia 'a different shirt'. There are seven forms for definite articles, both singular and plural. In the singular: lo, which corresponds to the uses of uno; il, which corresponds to the uses with the consonant of un; la, which corresponds to the uses of una; l', used for both masculine and feminine singular before vowels. In the plural: gli is the masculine plural of lo and l'; i is the plural of il; and le is the plural of feminine la and l
There are numerous contractions of with subsequent articles. There are numerous productive for diminutive, augmentative, pejorative, attenuating, etc., which are also used to create .
There are 27 pronouns, grouped in clitic and tonic pronouns. Personal pronouns are separated into three groups: subject, object (which takes the place of both direct and indirect objects), and reflexive. Second-person subject pronouns have both a polite and a familiar form. These two different types of addresses are very important in Italian social distinctions. All object pronouns have two forms: stressed and unstressed (clitics). Unstressed object pronouns are much more frequently used, and come before a verb conjugated for subject-verb ( la vedi: 'you see her'), after (in writing, attached to) non-conjugated verbs ( vedendola: 'seeing her'). Stressed object pronouns come after the verb, and are used when the emphasis is required, for contrast, or to avoid ambiguity ( vedo lui, ma non lei: 'I see him, but not her'). Aside from personal pronouns, Italian also has demonstrative, interrogative, possessive, and relative pronouns. There are two types of demonstrative pronouns: relatively near (this) and relatively far (that); there exists a third type of demonstrative denoting vicinity only to the listener, but it has fallen out of use. Demonstratives in Italian are repeated before each noun, unlike in English.
There are three regular sets of verbal conjugations, and various verbs are irregularly conjugated. Within each of these sets of conjugations, there are four simple (one-word) verbal conjugations by person/number in the indicative mood (present tense; past tense with imperfective aspect, past tense with perfective aspect, and future tense), two simple conjugations in the subjunctive mood (present tense and past tense), one simple conjugation in the conditional mood, and one simple conjugation in the imperative mood. Corresponding to each of the simple conjugations, there is a compound conjugation involving a simple conjugation of "to be" or "to have" followed by a past participle. "To have" is used to form compound conjugation when the verb is transitive ( ha detto, ha fatto: 'he/she has said, he/she has made/done'), while "to be" is used in the case of verbs of motion and some other intransitive verbs ( è andato, è stato: 'he has gone, he has been'). "To be" may be used with transitive verbs, but in such a case it makes the verb passive ( è detto, è fatto: 'it is said, it is made/done'). This rule is not absolute, and some exceptions do exist.
(//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/It-s%C3%AC.ogg) |
(//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/It-no.ogg) |
; |
(//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/It-arrivederci.ogg) |
; |
(//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/It-per_favore.ogg) |
; ; |
or or |
; |
(//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/It-non_capisco.ogg) |
(//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/It-parlate_inglese.ogg) (//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Parla_inglese.ogg) |
(//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/It-dov%27%C3%A8_il_bagno.ogg) |
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/ |
today | oggi | /ˈɔddʒi/ |
yesterday | ieri | /ˈjɛri/ |
tomorrow | domani | /doˈmani/ |
second | secondo | /seˈkondo/ |
minute | minuto | /miˈnuto/ |
hour | ora | /ˈora/ |
day | giorno | /ˈdʒorno/ |
week | settimana | /settiˈmana/ |
month | mese | /ˈmeze/, /ˈmese/ |
year | anno | /ˈanno/ |
one million | un milione | /miˈljone/ |
one billion | un miliardo | /miˈljardo/ |
one trillion | mille miliardi | /ˈmilleˈmiˈljardi/ |
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English:
International Phonetic Alphabet transcription:
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1906 | !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 | !scope="row" | in Nuoro | in Rome | Literature | "for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on Sardinia and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general" |
1934 | !scope="row" | in Agrigento | in Rome | Literature | "for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art" |
1959 | !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 | !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 | !scope="row" | in Leggiuno-Sangiano | in Milan | Literature | "who emulates the of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden" |
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