Italian Translation

Quick Facts

Italian, though less widely spoken than other Romance languages, has perhaps been its most influential. Modern Italian developed in the 13th and 14th centuries from Latin and a variety of local dialects. Of the major Romance languages, which have all been derived from the Latin language, Italian remains closest to the original. The Tuscan city of Florence, home to authors such as Dante, was the center of Italian literature. Due to the prowess of Florentine arts and letters, the Florentine dialect has had the greatest influence on the formation of modern Italian. The greatest single influence leading to the establishment of this Tuscan dialect as the dominant force on the Italian peninsula is widely agreed to have been Dante's Commedia, to which during the 14th century Boccaccio affixed the title Divina making it "the Divine Comedy." Although standard Italian is used throughout the country in government, at all levels of the educational system and in the media, dialectical differences continue to be considerable. Neapolitan, for example, often can not be understood by speakers from other regions. It is interesting to note that today many Italians hold that the language at its best is "the lingua toscana in bocca romana" which means "the Tuscan tongue in a Roman mouth." Italian is spoken by about 70 million people, most living in Italy.

Italian Dialects

Even for linguists, the line between "dialect" and "language" is fuzzy, or at least not unanimously agreed to. Sardinian, Sicilian, Neapolitan, Calabrian, Venetian and Friulian are all considered "languages" by Ethnologue and "dialects" by the Italian government. Most of them, Friulian and Sicilian in particular, are so influenced by non-Romance language elements as to be utterly unintelligible to an Italian speaker. In the modern era, the dialects of Italian are restricted to verbal exchanges between native speakers, and are seldom written, published, or distributed by the mass media. For many youth in Italy, the speaking of a language other than standard Italian has the connotation of backwardness, ignorance and poverty.