Italian

Although our group did not speak any Latin during our time in Rome, we did learn to speak some basic Italian. It struck me how similar Spanish and Italian are – in fact, 82% of vocabulary is similar and the sentence structure is very alike. Their definite articles are also clearly related:

Spanish: El, la, los, las

Italian: Il, lo, la, l'

These similarities are due to their Latin root, therefore anyone studying Spanish/ Latin will be more able to understand basic written and spoken Italian.

Here are some ‘must know’ Italian phrases if you are planning on visiting Italy:

English	Italian
Hello/ good morning	Buongiorno
Good afternoon	Buon pomeriggio
Good evening	Buonasera
Excuse me	Mi scusi
I do not speak much Italian	Non parlo molto bene italiano
Goodbye	Ciao/Arrivederci
Yes/ No	Si/ no

History of Italian:

Standard Italian dates back to the 12^th century however linguists are able to see how Vulgar Latin formed the separate language in 900AD.

In 1200, we can view this change by looking at Dante’s epic poetry, known as Commedia. This group of poetry was based on Virgil’s Aeneid and Cicero’s work; however, he used a distinct language. These poems were read across Italy and for a long time, his dialect was considered the ‘canonical standard’ of higher class Italian. Dante was from Florence and even today, the dialect of Firenze is the official Italian language.

Italian was influenced greatly by historical events, for example, the conquest and Italian occupation of Napoleon helped to spread the language. After this, Italian was known as ‘lingua franca’ which was used as a Latin substitute across much of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea. Despite this, only 2.5% of the population of Italy spoke the standardised language in 1861.

The popularity of Italian has been partly due to its role in music as it is considered the universal language of music and is written to demonstrate tempo and directions on sheet music. Due to this, musicians all around the world understand Italian and this may encourage them to learn more of the language.  

The language itself:

Italian is a member of the Romance and Italic languages and derived diachronically from Latin. However, Italian contrasts other Romance languages in the way that it retains a difference between short and long consonants, like Latin.

The Italian alphabet consist of only 21 letters as 〈j, k, w, x, y〉 are not counted although they exist in loanwords such as ‘weekend’. The letter (h) is generally silent, especially when at the beginning of a word, i.e. ‘ho’ (I have). The (h) has been changed to (g) in many cases, for example I pull is ‘traho’ in Latin but ‘traggo’ in Italian.

The map below shows the population density of Italian speakers across Europe. The darkest purple means ‘lingua madre’ which are mother tongue speakers or L1 whereas the other shades show that Italian is a learned language (L2). This shows that although the vast majority of native speakers live in Italy itself, quite large proportions of Europeans learn language as a second language. Italian is still common in Africa and America due to a high Italian influence and immigration.