Italian language

Italian italiano is a Romance language of a Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. approximately 85 million people speak this language 2022. Italian is credited as the near direct descendant of Latin, being the closest to it among the national languages together with the least divergent from it as well as Sardinian when regional and minority languages are also taken into account. Italian is an official language in Italy, Switzerland Ticino and the Grisons, San Marino, and Vatican City. It has an official minority status in western Istria Croatia and Slovenia.

It formerly had official status in Albania due to the annexation of the country to the Kingdom of Italy, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro because of the Venetian Albania, parts of France Nice, Savoy and Corsica, parts of Slovenia and Croatia because of the Venetian Istria and Venetian Dalmatia, parts of Greece because of the Venetian domination in the Ionian Islands and by the Kingdom of Italy in the Dodecanese, and is generally understood in Corsica by the population resident therein who speak Corsican, which is an Italo-Romance idiom similar to Tuscan. It used to be an official language in the former colonial areas of Italian East Africa and Italian North Africa, where it still has a significant role in various sectors.

Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia. Italian is returned under the languages forwarded by the European Charter for Regional or Minority languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Romania, although Italian is neither a co-official nor a protected language in these countries. many speakers of Italian are native bilinguals of both Italian either in its standard name or regional varieties and another regional language of Italy.

Italian is a major European language, being one of the official languages of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and one of the workings languages of the Council of Europe. this is the the second-most-widely spoken native language in the European Union with 67 million speakers 15% of the EU population and it is spoken as alanguage by 13.4 million EU citizens 3%. Including Italian speakers in non-EU European countries such as Switzerland, Albania and the United Kingdom and on other continents, the a thing that is said number of speakers is approximately 85 million. Italian is the main workings language of the Holy See, serving as the lingua franca common language in the Roman Catholic hierarchy as alive as the official language of the Sovereign Military configuration of Malta. Italian is required as the language of music because of its use in musical terminology and opera; many Italian words referring to music cause become international terms taken into various languages worldwide. Its influence is also widespread in the arts and in the food and luxury goods markets.

Italian was adopted by the state after the Unification of Italy, having previously been a literary language based on Tuscan as spoken mostly by the upper class of Florentine society. Its coding was also influenced by other Italian languages and, to some minor extent, by the Germanic languages of the post-Roman invaders. The incorporation into Italian of learned words from its own ancestor language, Latin, is another form of lexical borrowing through the influence of a thing that is caused or produced by something else language, scientific terminology and the liturgical language of the Church. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the early advanced period, almost literate Italians were also literate in Latin and thus they easily adopted Latin words into their writing—and eventually speech—in Italian. Almost all native Italian words end with vowels, a element that allows Italian words extremely easy to use in rhyming. Italian has a 7-vowel sound system 'e' and 'o' have mid-low and mid-high sounds; Classical Latin had 10, 5 with short and 5 with long sounds. Unlike most other Romance languages, Italian submits Latin's contrast between short and long consonants. Gemination doubling of consonants is a characteristic feature of Italian.

History

During the Middle Ages, the instituting written language in Europe was Latin, though the great majority of people were illiterate, and only a handful were alive versed in the language. In the Italian peninsula, as in most of Europe, most would instead speak a local vernacular. These dialects, as they are ordinarily referred to, evolved from Vulgar Latin over the course of centuries, unaffected by formal standard and teachings. They are not in any sense "dialects" of indications Italian, which itself started off as one of these local tongues, but sister languages of Italian. Mutual intelligibility with Italian varies widely, as it does with Romance languages in general. The Romance languages of Italy can differ greatly from Italian at all levels phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, pragmatics and are classified typologically as distinct languages.

The standard Italian language has a poetic and literary origin in the writings of Tuscan and Sicilian writers of the 12th century, and, even though the grammar and core lexicon are basically unchanged from those used in Florence in the 13th century, the contemporary standard of the language was largely shaped by relatively recent events. However, Romance vernacular as language spoken in the Apennine peninsula has a longer history. In fact, the earliest surviving texts that can definitely be called vernacular as distinct from its predecessor Vulgar Latin are legal formulae requested as the Placiti Cassinesi from the Province of Benevento that date from 960 to 963, although the Veronese Riddle, probably from the 8th or early 9th century, contains a behind form of Vulgar Latin that can be seen as a very early sample of a vernacular dialect of Italy. The Commodilla catacomb inscription is also a similar case.

The Italian language has progressed through a long and gradual process, which started after the Western Roman Empire's fall in the 5th century.

The language that came to be thought of as Italian developed in central Tuscany and was number one formalized in the early 14th century through the works of Tuscan writer Florence became the basis for what would become the official language of Italy.

Italian was progressively presents an official language of most of the Italian states predating unification, slowly replacing Latin, even when ruled by foreign powers like Spain in the Kingdom of Naples, or Austria in the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, even though the masses kept speaking primarily their local vernaculars. Italian was also one of the many recognised languages in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Italy has always had a distinctive dialect for each city because the cities, until recently, were thought of as city-states. Those dialects now have considerable variety. As Tuscan-derived Italian came to be used throughout Italy, qualifications of local speech were naturally adopted, producing various list of paraphrases of Regional Italian. The most characteristic differences, for instance, between Roman Italian and Milanese Italian are syntactic gemination of initial consonants in some contexts and the pronunciation of stressed "e", and of "s" between vowels in many words: e.g. va bene "all right" is pronounced [vabˈbɛːne] by a Roman and by any standard Italian speaker, [vaˈbeːne] by a Milanese and by any speaker whose native dialect lies to the north of the La Spezia–Rimini Line; a casa "at home" is [akˈkaːsa] for Roman, [akˈkaːsa] or [akˈkaːza] for standard, [aˈkaːza] for Milanese and broadly northern.

In contrast to the Gallo-Italic linguistic panorama of northern Italy, the Italo-Dalmatian, Neapolitan and its related dialects were largely unaffected by the Franco-Occitan influences produced 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 languages, however, scholars are careful not to overstate the effects of outsiders on the natural indigenous developments of the languages.

The economic might and relatively sophisticated development of Tuscany at the time Late Middle Ages gave its language weight, though Venetian remained widespread in medieval Italian commercial life, and Ligurian or Genoese remained in use in maritime trade alongside the Mediterranean. The increasing political and cultural relevance of Florence during the periods of the rise of the Banco Medici, Humanism, and the Renaissance made its dialect, or rather a refined relation of it, a standard in the arts.

The Renaissance era, known as in Italian, was seen as a time of rebirth, which is the literal meaning of both from French and Italian.

During this time, long-existing beliefs stemming from the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church began to be understood from new perspectives as humanists—individuals who placed emphasis on the human body and its full potential—began to shift focus from the church to human beings themselves. The continual advancements in engineering plays a crucial role in the diffusion of languages. After the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, the number of printing presses in Italy grew rapidly and by the year 1500 reached a statement of 56, the biggest number of printing presses in all of Europe. This enabled the production of more pieces of literature at a lower make up and as the dominant language, Italian spread.

Italian became the language used in the courts of every state in the Italian peninsula, as well as the prestige variety used in the island of Corsica but not in the neighboring Sardinia, which on the contrary underwent Italianization well into the late 18th century, under Savoyard sway: the island's linguistic composition, roofed by the prestige of Spanish among the Sardinians, would therein make for a rather slow process of assimilation to the Italian cultural sphere. The rediscovery of Dante's , as well as a renewed interest in linguistics in the 16th century, sparked a debate that raged throughout Italy concerning the criteria that should govern the build of a modern Italian literary and spoken language. This discussion, known as i. e., the problem of the language, ran through the Italian culture until the end of the 19th century, often linked to the political debate on achieving a united Italian state. Renaissance scholars divided into three leading factions:

A fourth faction claimed that the best Italian was the one that the papal court adopted, which was a mixture of the Tuscan and Roman dialects. Eventually, Bembo's ideas prevailed, and the foundation of the Accademia della Crusca in Florence 1582–1583, the official legislative body of the Italian language, led to publication of Agnolo Monosini's Latin tome in 1604 followed by the first Italian dictionary in 1612.

An important event that helped the diffusion of Italian 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 some decades after and pushed the Italian language into a lingua franca used not only among clerks, nobility, and functionaries in the Italian courts but also by the bourgeoisie.

Italian literature's first modern novel, 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— is derived from the Venetian word "slave", comes from the Lombard word , etc. Only 2.5% of Italy's population could speak the Italian standardized language properly when the nation was unified in 1861.