8 Italian Language Facts
* The Italian language has been around since – at least – the 900s. Like other Romance languages, it is derived from Latin. The first known written text resembling what we now recognize as Italian was a legal document regarding a dispute over land ownership between south Italian monasteries. Known as the Placiti Cassinesi, the documents date back to the years 963-960.
* … but the language didn’t become standardized until the time of Dante Alighieri, one of the most famous Italian writers of all time. He penned The Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia), which was completed in 1320, a year before his death. In the late Middle Ages, the vast majority of poetry and literary works were written in Latin, but Dante was a proponent of vernacular literature that used the common language of the people. He wrote The Divine Comedy in the Tuscan dialect, a highly unorthodox choice that would set the standard for Italian literature and position Tuscan dialect as the language of high culture and the basis for the ‘standard’ Italian spoken today. For his role in establishing modern Italian, Dante is often referred to as the “father of the Italian language.”
* Italy didn’t actually have a national language until the 20th century. Dante and other writers and linguists like Petrarch paved the path for the Tuscan dialect to become the national language, but when Italy became one unified nation in 1861 and officially adopted Tuscan Italian as its national tongue, fewer than 2.5% of the people could actually speak it.
* The different Italian dialects are like their own languages. Before unification in 1861, what we now know as Italy was made up of smaller independent states, each with their own regional language. Though some of these dialects — including those spoken in and around the cities of Naples and Venice and on the islands of Sicily and Sardinia — share their Latin roots with Tuscan Italian, they are recognized as unique Romance languages that developed entirely independently of today’s Italian. They differ a lot from standard Italian in sound, syntax, and vocabulary. Regional dialects coexist with standard Italian in most cities today, with an estimated 60% of the people claiming proficiency in their local language. Over 30 of these dialects are classified as endangered languages by UNESCO.
* The Italian alphabet is only 21 letters. Italian uses the same Roman characters as the English language… minus 5 of them. The letters j, k, w, x, and y simply do not exist, so if you happen to see them used in an Italian text, that means the word is borrowed from another language.
* Italian is the language of classical music. Anyone who has studied music will be familiar with terms like crescendo, forte, soprano, alto, and a tempo — all of them Italian words. Musical notation became commonplace during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, and as many of the most important composers of that time were Italian, these words became the standard for musicians everywhere.
* Standard Italian is spoken by 85 million people worldwide. It‘s the first language of some 65 million people, and the second language of a further 15 million. In addition to being the national language of Italy, It’s 1 of the national languages of San Marino, Vatican City, and Switzerland. It’s also the 2nd-most spoken language in Argentina, where it is estimated that over half the population is of Italian descent, making Italians the largest ethnic group in the country.
* Italian is the 5th most studied language in the USA. It has been a widely spoken language in the USA due to the large-scale Italian immigration over the centuries, and is currently spoken by over 700,000 Americans, the majority of whom reside in New York and New Jersey. It‘s the 5th most studied language in American schools (preceded by Spanish, French, American Sign Language, and German).
