Italian Language Resources

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Italian is a Romance language spoken by over 60 million people as a native language, mostly in Italy. In Switzerland, Italian is one of four languages used officially. It is also the official language of San Marino, as well and the primary language of the Vatican.  Italian is based on Tuscan (in particular on the dialects of the cities of Florence, Pisa and Siena) and is somewhere between the languages of the South and Italian languages of the North. Its development was influenced by the other Italian dialects and by the Germanic language to some degree due to the Roman Barbaric invaders. However, despite these influences, it remains largely based on latin.

Of the Romance languages, Italian is considered to be the nearest to Latin in vocabulary.  Lexical similarity is 89% with French, 87% with Catalan, 85% with Sardinian, 82% with Spanish, 78% with Rhaeto-Romance, and 77% with Romanian.  Indeed, any native or non-native speaker of any romance language, will find similarities, and possibly be able to read the written language to a great extent.   

Although Italian has a long history, the majority of the language had developed relatively recently. The oldest Italian texts - text that can truly be attributed as "italian" date to around 950 AD.  What became Italian was first formalized in the early14th century through the writings of poet Dante Alighieri, who mixed southern Italian languages and Tuscan in his epic poems known as the Commedia.  Dante's revered works were read all through Italy and his dialect became the gold standard that all Italians could understand. To this day, Dante is credited with standardizing the Italian language, making the Tuscan dialect the effective forerunner of the modern language.

Italy has always had unique dialect for each city since the cities were thought of as city-states. There is now much variety, however. As Tuscan-based Italian was used throughout the nation, parts of local speech were adopted, generating differing versions of Italian. The most telling differences between Roman Italian and Milanese Italian are the duplication of consonants and the pronunciation of stressed "e", and of "s" in some cases.

Differing from the dialects of northern Italy, southern Italian dialects were unaffected by the Franco-Occitan influences introduced to Italy, mostly from France, during the Dark Ages. With Northern Italian dialects, however, scholars are careful not to exaggerate the effects of outsiders on the natural developments of the languages.

Tuscany's economic clout in the late middle ages gave its dialect more power, although Venetian was widespread in commercial transactions. Also, Florence, and it's cultural activities (Humanism and the Renaissance) made its dialect prevalent in the arts.

Dante's De vulgari eloquentia was re-discovetred in the 16th century and renewed a debate which stormed through Italy regarding the criteria chosen to establish a modern Italian standard spoken language. Three factions were formed:  the purists, headed by Pietro Bembo who trumpeted that the language should only be based on the great literary classics (Petrarch, and Boccaccio but not Dante), Niccolò Machiavelli preferred the version spoken by plain folk in their own times, and the attendants like Baldassarre Castiglione and Gian Giorgio Trissino stressed insistantly that each local dialect must be included in some manner in the new standard. In time, Bembo's ideas won out, resulting in the first Italian dictionary in 1612 and the founding of the Accademia della Crusca in Florence (1582-3), the official legislative body of the Italian language.

Two additional defining moments in the history of the Italian language came between 1500 and 1850 through invasions. Spanish rulers invaded and remained in Italy down to Rome and the Vatican in the mid-16th century. At this time, Italian began to conform with many of the gramatical constructs of the Spanish language. Following this, the Napoleonic wars brought elements of the French language into the mix.

Italian literature's first modern novel, I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), by Alessandro Manzoni helped to further the standard by "rinsing" his Milanese 'in the waters of the Arno" (Florence's river), as he wrote in the Preface to his 1840 edition.  After unification a tremendous number of civil servants and soldiers recruited from all over the country brought forth many more words and idiomatic expressions from their home lands.  And so lives modern Italian.

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Italian Learning Resources on the Web

Italian Software

Rosetta Stone V3: Arabic, Level 1, 2 & 3

The excellent Rosetta Stone program (see Review).  Find out if Rosetta Stone products are right for your learning needs

Italian Books

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