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The Italian language has a long history, but the modern standard of the language was largely shaped by relatively recent events. The earliest surviving texts that can definitely be called Italian (or more accurately, vernacular, as distinct from its predecessor Vulgar Latin) are legal formulae from the region of Benevento that date from 960-963.[8] What would come to be thought of as Italian was first formalized in the first years of the 14th century through the works of Dante Alighieri, who mixed southern Italian languages, especially Sicilian, with his native Florentine in his epic poems known collectively as the Commedia, to which Giovanni Boccaccio later affixed the title Divina. Dante's much-loved works were read throughout Italy and his written dialect became the "canonical standard" that all educated Italians could understand. Dante is still credited with standardizing the Italian language and, thus, the dialect of Florence became the basis for what would become the official language of Italy.
Italian was often an official language of the various Italian states pre-dating unification, slowly usurping Latin, even when ruled by foreign powers (such as the Spanish in the Kingdom of Naples, or the Austrians in the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia), even though the masses spoke primarily vernacular languages and dialects. Italian was also one of the many recognised languages in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Italy has always had a distinctive dialect for each city since the cities were, until recently, thought of as city-states. Those dialects now have considerable variety, however. 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 Roman Italian and Milanese Italian are the gemination of initial consonants and the pronunciation of stressed "e", and of "s" in some cases (e.g. va bene "all right": is pronounced [va ˈbːɛne] by a Roman (and by any standard-speaker, like a Florentine), [va ˈbene] by a Milanese (and by any speaker whose native dialect lies to the north of La Spezia-Rimini Line); a casa "at home": Roman and standard [a ˈkːasa], Milanese and generally northern [a ˈkaza]). (See Raddoppiamento fonosintattico).
In contrast to the Northern Italian language, southern Italian dialects and languages were largely untouched by the Franco-Occitan influences introduced to Italy, mainly by bards 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 language, however, scholars are careful not to overstate the effects of outsiders on the natural indigenous developments of the languages. (See La Spezia-Rimini Line).
The economic might and relatively advanced development of Tuscany at the time (Late Middle Ages), gave its dialect weight, though Venetian language remained widespread in medieval Italian commercial life, as well as Ligurian (or Genoese) remained in use in maritime trade alongside the Mediterranean. Also, the increasing political and cultural relevance of Florence during the periods of the rise of Medici's bank, Humanism and the Renaissance made its dialect, or rather a refined version of it, a standard in the arts.
[ Tags:Italy,France,Tuscan,Italian Dialects,Stress,Latin,Spanish,Vulgar Latin,Benevento,Dante Alighieri,Sicilian,Commedia,Giovanni Boccaccio,Florence,Kingdom Of Naples,Kingdom Of Lombardy-venetia,Austro-hungarian Empire,City-states,Variety,Roman,Milanese,Gemination,La Spezia-rimini Line,Raddoppiamento Fonosintattico,Southern Italian,Occitan,Bards,Middle Ages,Tuscany,Late Middle Ages,Venetian Language,Ligurian (or Genoese),Humanism,Renaissance,Italians,Austria,Talian,Venetian,Medieval, | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Middle Ages |
The re-discovery 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. Scholars divided into three factions:
The purists, headed by Pietro Bembo (who in his Gli Asolani claimed the language might only be based on the great literary classics...notably, Petrarch and Boccaccio). The purists thought the Divine Comedy not dignified enough because it used elements from non-lyric registers of the language.
Niccolò Machiavelli and other Florentines preferred the version spoken by ordinary people in their own times.
The courtiers, like Baldassarre Castiglione and Gian Giorgio Trissino, insisted that each local vernacular must contribute to the new standard.
A fourth faction claimed the best Italian was the one the papal court adopted. Eventually, Bembo's ideas prevailed, and led to publication of the first Italian dictionary in 1612 and the foundation of the Accademia della Crusca in Florence (1582-3), the official legislative body of the Italian language.
[ | Tags:Accademia Della Crusca,De Vulgari Eloquentia,Purists,Pietro Bembo,Gli Asolani,Petrarch,Niccolò Machiavelli,Florentines,Courtiers,Baldassarre Castiglione,Gian Giorgio Trissino, Modern era |
Two notable defining moments in the history of the Italian language came between 1500 and 1850. Both events were invasions. The rulers of Spain invaded and occupied Italy down to Rome and the Vatican in the mid-16th century (see the aftermath of the Italian Wars). This occupation left a lasting influence upon the formerly irregular Italian grammar, simplifying it to conform more with the dominant Spanish language.[citation needed] The second was the conquest and occupation of Italy by Napoleon in the early 19th century (who was himself of Italian-Corsican descent). This conquest propelled the unification of Italy, and pushed the Italian language into a lingua franca. The increased unity among people on the Italian peninsula weakened many regional languages.[citation needed]
[ | Tags:Unification Of Italy,Italian Wars,Citation Needed,Napoleon,Lingua Franca,Corsica, Contemporary times |
Italian literature's first modern novel, I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), by Alessandro Manzoni further defined the standard by "rinsing" his Milanese "in the waters of the Arno" (Florence's river), as he states in the Preface to his 1840 edition.
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 ("ciao" is Venetian, "panettone" is in the Milanese dialect of the Lombard language etc.). Only 2.5% of Italy’s population could speak Italian language when the nation unified in 1861.[9]
[ | Tags:Alessandro Manzoni,Arno,Ciao,Panettone,Lombard Language, Classification |
Italian is most closely related to the other two Italo-Dalmatian languages, Sicilian and the extinct Dalmatian. The three are part of the Italo-Western grouping of the Romance languages, which are a subgroup of the Italic branch of Indo-European.
[ | Tags:Indo-european,Italic,Romance,Italo-western,Romance Language,Romance Languages,Dalmatian, Geographic distribution |
Knowledge of Italian in Europe
The geographic distribution of the Italian language in the world: large Italian-speaking communities are shown in green; light blue indicates areas where Italian language was used as official during the italian colonial period
The list below shows the geographical distribution of the Italian language around the world. The total number of native speakers of Italian are between 65 and 75 million people.[10][11] Those who speak Italian as a second or cultural language are estimated to be between 120 and 150 million people.[11]
Official:
European Union
Italy
San Marino
Sovereign Military Order of Malta
Switzerland
Vatican City
Slovenia (Only in Slovenian Littoral)
Croatia (Only in Istria County)
Historical Significance in:
France (in Corsica, Savoy and Nice)
Albania
Croatia (Istria, Kvarner,Dalmatia)
Malta
Monaco
Montenegro
Greece (In Dodecanese 1912-1943)
Historically official:
Eritrea (1890–1941)
Somalia (Italian Somaliland 1895-1960)
China (In Tientsin 1901-1944)
Libya (1912–1943)
Croatia (In the Free State of Fiume 1920-1924)
Greece (In Dodecanese 1912-1943 and in the Ionian Islands during the Septinsular Republic 1800-1807 and the United States of the Ionian Islands 1815-1864)
Albania (1938–1945)
Malta (until 1934)
Tunisia (1942–1943)
Austria-Hungary (until 1918)
Used by some immigrant communities in:
Brazil 1,500,000[12]
Argentina 1,500,000[13]
Uruguay
Mexico
USA 1,008,370[14]
France 500,000-1,000,000
Canada 661,000[15]
Germany 548,000[16]
Switzerland over 500,000
Venezuela 400,000[17]
Australia 353,605[18]
Belgium 250,000
UK 200,000[19]
Egypt 72,400[20]
Italian is the official language of Italy and San Marino, and one of the official languages of Switzerland, spoken mainly in the cantons of Ticino and part of Graubünden (Grigioni in Italian), which together are a region referred to as Italian Switzerland. It is also the official language with Croatian and Slovenian in some areas of Istria, where an Italian minority exists. In the cities of Santa Teresa and Vila Velha it enjoys official status alongside Portuguese, being "knighted" as an ethnic language. It is the primary language of the Vatican City and is widely used and taught in Monaco and Malta. It served as Malta's official language until the Maltese language was enshrined in the 1934 Constitution. It is also spoken to a significant extent in France, with over 1,000,000 speakers [21] (especially in Corsica and the County of Nice, areas that historically spoke Italian dialects before annexation to France), and it is understood by large parts of the populations of Albania and coastal Montenegro, reached by many Italian TV channels.
Italian is also spoken by some in former Italian colonies in Africa (Libya and Eritrea). However, its use has sharply dropped off since the colonial period. In Eritrea, Italian is widely understood.[22] In fact, for 50 years, during the colonial period, Italian was the language of education, but as of 1997[update], there is only one Italian-language school remaining, with 470 pupils. The name of the only Italian-language school in Eritrea is Scuola Italiana di Asmara,[23] which was also the only Italian-language school in Ethiopia, when Eritrea was a province of Ethiopia.[24] The number of Italian speakers may increase a little when the number of students at that school increases and because it is still spoken in commerce,[25] and Eritrea will be the only African nation where Italian is widely spoken and understood. In Libya, Italian has been wiped out by the Libyan Revolution's Arabization programs in education and media. In Egypt and Tunisia, it is mostly spoken by Italian Egyptians and Italian Tunisians and some professionals of non-Italian descent. In all of the above former Italian African colonies, most of the fluent Italian speakers are people who grew up in officially Italian-speaking nations, most especially Italy, and returned to Africa.
Italian and Italian dialects are widely used by Italian immigrants and many of their descendants (see Italians) living throughout Western Europe (especially France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Luxembourg), the United States, Canada, Australia, and Latin America (especially Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela).
In the United States, Italian speakers are most commonly found in five cities: Boston (7,000),[26] Chicago (12,000),[27] the Miami region (27,000),[28] New York City (140,000),[29] and Philadelphia (15,000).[30] According to the United States Census in 2000, over 1 million Italian Americans spoke Italian at home, with the largest concentrations—and nearly half of the total—found in the states of New York (294,271) and New Jersey (116,365).[31] In Canada, Italian is the fourth most commonly spoken language, with 661,000 speakers (or about 2.1% of the population) according to the 2006 Census. Particularly large Italian-speaking communities are found in Montreal (c. 179,000) and Toronto (c. 262,000).[15] Italian is also strongly visible in the Hamilton area. Italian is the second most commonly spoken language in Australia, where 353,605 Italian Australians, or 1.9% of the population, reported speaking Italian at home in the 2001 Census.[32] In 2001 there were 130,000 Italian speakers in Melbourne,[33] and 90,000 in Sydney.[34]
[ | Tags:Vatican City,Slovenia,Croatia,Istria,San Marino,Switzerland,Official Languages,Grigioni,Ticino,Savoy,Kvarner,Greece,Somalia,China,Dodecanese,Ionian Islands,Septinsular Republic,Tunisia,Brazil,Argentina,Usa,Canada,Germany,Venezuela,Australia,Uk,Egypt, Italian language education |
Italian is widely taught in many schools around the world, but rarely as the first foreign language; in fact, Italian generally is the fourth or fifth most taught foreign language in the world.[35]
In the United States, Italian is the fifth most taught foreign language after Spanish, French, German, and American Sign Language, respectively.[36] Throughout the world, Italian is the fifth most taught foreign language, after English, Spanish, French, and German.[37]
In the European Union, Italian is spoken as a mother tongue by 13% of the population or 65 million people,[38] mainly in Italy. In all of the EU, it is spoken as a second language by 3% of the population or by 14 million people. In addition, among EU states, the Italian language is most likely to be learned as a second language in Malta by 61% of the population, as well as in Croatia by 14% of the population, Slovenia by 12% of the population, Austria by 11% of the population, Romania by 8% of the population, and by France and Greece by 6% of the population.[38] Italian is also one of the national languages of Switzerland, which is not a part of the European Union.[39] Italian language is also well known and studied in Albania, another non-EU member, due to the historical and geographical proximity between the two countries.
[ | Tags:French, Influence and derived languages |
See also: Italians
From the late 19th to the mid 20th century, thousands of Italians settled in Argentina, Uruguay, southern Brazil, and Venezuela, where they formed a very strong physical and cultural presence (see the Italian diaspora).
In some cases, colonies were established where variants of Italian dialects were used, and some continue to use a derived dialect. An example is Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, where Talian is used, and in the town of Chipilo near Puebla, Mexico; each continuing to use a derived form of Venetian dating back to the 19th century. Another example is Cocoliche, an Italian-Spanish pidgin once spoken in Argentina and especially in Buenos Aires, and Lunfardo.
Rioplatense Spanish, and particularly the speech of the city of Buenos Aires, has intonation patterns that resemble those of Italian dialects, due to the fact that Argentina has had a continuous large influx of Italian settlers since the second half of the 19th century; initially primarily from Northern Italy; then, since the beginning of the twentieth century, mostly from Southern Italy.
[ | Tags: Italian as a lingua franca |
See also: Mediterranean Lingua Franca
Starting in late medieval times, Italian language variants replaced Latin to become the primary commercial language in much of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea (especially the Tuscan and Venetian variants). This was consolidated during the Renaissance with the strength of Italian and the rise of humanism in the arts.
During the Renaissance, Italy held artistic sway over the rest of Europe. All educated European gentlemen were expected to make the Grand Tour, visiting Italy to see its great historical monuments and works of art. It thus became expected that educated Europeans would learn at least some Italian; the English poet John Milton, for instance, wrote some of his early poetry in Italian. In England, Italian became the second most common modern language to be learned, after French (though the classical languages, Latin and Greek, came first). However, by the late 18th century, Italian tended to be replaced by German as the second modern language in the curriculum. Yet Italian loanwords continue to be used in most other European languages in matters of art and music.
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. The presence of Italian as the primary language in the Vatican City indicates use, not only within the Holy See, but also throughout the world where an episcopal seat is present.[citation needed] It continues to be used in music and opera. Other examples where Italian is sometimes used as a means of communication is in some sports (sometimes in football[citation needed] and motorsports) and in the design and fashion industries.
[ | Tags: Dialects |
Main article: Italian dialects
Italian dialects
In Italy, all Romance languages spoken as the vernacular, other than standard Italian and other unrelated, non-Italian languages, are termed "Italian dialects".
Many Italian dialects may be considered as historical languages in their own right.[40] These include recognized language groups such as Friulian, Neapolitan, Sardinian, Sicilian, Ligurian, Piedmontese, Venetian, and others, and regional variants of these languages such as Calabrian. The distinction between dialect and language has been made by scholars (such as Francesco Bruni): on the one hand are the languages that made up the Italian koine; and on the other, those that had little or no part in it, such as Albanian, Greek, German, Ladin, and Occitan, which some minorities still speak.
Regional differences can be recognized by various factors: the openness of vowels, the length of the consonants, and influence of the local dialect (for example, in informal situations the contraction annà replaces andare in the area of Rome for the infinitive "to go" and "nare" is what Venetians say for the infinitive "to go").
[ | Tags:Sardinian, Writing system |
Main article: Italian alphabet
The Italian alphabet has only 21 letters. The letters ‹j, k, w, x, y› are excluded. They appear in loanwords such as jeans, whisky and taxi. The letter ‹x› has become common in standard Italian with the prefix extra-. The letter ‹j› is an archaic orthographic variant of ‹i›. It appears in the first name Jacopo and in some Italian place names, such as Bajardo, Bojano, Joppolo, Jerzu, Jesolo, Jesi, Ajaccio, among numerous others. It also appears in Mar Jonio, an alternative spelling of Mar Ionio (the Ionian Sea). The letter ‹j› may appear in dialectal words, but its use is discouraged in contemporary standard Italian. The foreign letters can be substituted with phonetically equivalent native Italian letters and digraphs: ‹gi› or ‹i› for ‹j›; ‹c› or ‹ch› for ‹k› (including in the standard prefix kilo-); ‹u› or ‹v› for ‹w›; ‹s›, ‹ss›, or ‹cs› for ‹x›; and ‹i› for ‹y›.
The acute accent is used over ‹e› to indicate a front close-mid vowel, as in perché "why, because". The grave accent is used over ‹e› to indicate a front open-mid vowel, as in tè "tea". The grave accent is used over any vowel to indicate word-final stress, as in gioventù "youth". The penultimate syllable is typically stressed. If non-final syllables are stressed, the accent is not mandatory (unlike in Spanish or in Greek) and virtually always omitted. When a word is potentially ambiguous, the accent is sometimes used for disambiguation, as for prìncipi "princes" and princìpi "principles" and for è "is" and e "and". The accent on monosyllabic words, excluding function words, is compulsory. Rare, polysyllabic words can have doubtf | Tags: |