Italian: a short portrait

Where it comes from

Italian is a Romance language, and of the large ones it has stayed closest to Latin in its vocabulary: vino, terra and luna are only a small step from Latin vinum, terra and luna.

When the Roman Empire fell apart, the Latin spoken in every corner of the peninsula developed in its own direction. The result was not one Italian but many local languages — Venetian, Neapolitan, Sicilian and dozens more. They are not «broken Italian»: they are sisters of Italian, all daughters of Latin.

One of the oldest written records of this new language comes from 960, from a court case about land near Monte Cassino: the witnesses’ sworn statement was written down in the local speech rather than in Latin.

A short history

In the fourteenth century three writers from Florence — Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio — wrote great works in their own Tuscan instead of in Latin. Dante’s Divina Commedia above all gave Tuscan a prestige no other dialect had. In the sixteenth century scholars argued over which Italian should be the model, and the Tuscan of these writers won.

In 1583 the Accademia della Crusca was founded in Florence; its dictionary of 1612 was one of the first great dictionaries of any European language. The academy’s name means «bran», because it set out to separate the good flour of the language from the husks.

When Italy became one state in 1861, only a small minority of its people used standard Italian in daily life — most spoke their local language. The novelist Alessandro Manzoni had already rewritten his famous novel I promessi sposi in the Italian of Florence to give the nation a model. What really spread the standard language, though, was the twentieth century: school, military service, migration within the country, radio and, above all, television.

Where it is spoken today

Italian is the language of Italy and San Marino, one of the four national languages of Switzerland — spoken in Ticino and in parts of Graubünden — and the everyday language of Vatican City. It is an official minority language in parts of Slovenia and Croatia, and large communities of Italian origin live in Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Canada, Australia and Germany.

Standard Italian sounds a little different from region to region, and everybody can tell where a speaker comes from. Some words change with the map too: a watermelon is an anguria in the north and a cocomero in central Italy.

The local languages are still alive, especially in the south, in the Veneto and among older people, and many Italians switch between their dialect and the standard language without thinking about it. Sardinian is usually counted as a language of its own.

How Italian is written

Italian uses the Latin alphabet, but native words need only 21 letters: j, k, w, x and y appear only in borrowed words. The spelling follows the sound closely — what you see is very nearly what you say.

Two rules carry most of the reading. C and g are soft before e and i, as in ciao and gelato, and an h after them makes them hard again, as in chiesa and spaghetti. Apart from that the h is silent.

Double consonants are really pronounced longer, and they change the meaning: palashovelpallaballcarodearcarrocart

A written accent appears almost only on a stressed final vowel: città, perché, caffè.

Words it gave and words it took

Italian gave the world the vocabulary of music — «piano», «soprano», «opera», «tempo», «allegro», «crescendo» — and much of the vocabulary of food. Banking came from the Italian cities too: «bank» goes back to banca, the bench of a money-changer. «Umbrella», «ghetto», «fiasco», «graffiti» and «influenza» are Italian as well, and «malaria» is simply mal’aria, «bad air».

Italian in turn took words from the Germanic peoples who ruled parts of Italy after Rome, such as la guerra war and bianco white, and from Arabic, often by way of Sicily: lo zuccherosugarl’aranciaorangeil magazzinowarehouse

Modern Italian borrows from English freely — il computer, il film, lo sport — and sometimes gives an English word a meaning of its own: il golf is not only the game but also a cardigan.

What tends to surprise English speakers

The subject pronoun is usually left out, because the verb ending already says who is speaking: parlo is «I speak». The plural is made by changing the final vowel instead of adding an s — il libro becomes i libri, la casa becomes le case — and the article itself depends on the sound that follows: il treno, lo studente, l’amico.

The polite «you» is Lei, the same word as «she», with the verb in the third person. So Lei è italiana? can mean «Are you Italian?» or «Is she Italian?», and only the situation tells you which.

Many words look English and mean something else: la cameraroomi parentirelativesla libreriabookshopmorbidosoftla fattoriafarm