Latin is the forefather of Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian and the language of Italy can be traced back to somewhere in the later part of the tenth century. But, it wasn’t until four more centuries passed that the Italian language became standardized and took its current shape.

There are nearly seventy million people speaking Italian nowadays. Most of whom live in San Marino, Vatican, Switzerland and Italy but there are also a multitude of communities that speak Italian in the South America, United States, Slovenia, Malta and Croatia.

The Italian language is known for having many, many flavorful dialects. Some of the many linguists have even made statements about their being different types of languages spoken throughout each Italian city. Infact, the Neapolitan and Sicilian languages are nearly indiscernible as an Italian language, while the Tuscan, Romanesco, Umbrian, and Laziale dialects hold right to what is believed to be the Italian standard.

The Italian alphabet consists of twenty-one main letters, with an additional five being used solely in foreign names. Most of the vocabulary for this language comes from Latin, but Italian manages to refresh simply by the borrowing of words from German, French and English. Much of the Italian words have steadily become part of other foreign vocabularies, mainly musical terms, related art words and names of food.

The grammar of not just Italian but the rest of the Romance languages comes from Latin. Nouns are marked for gender and number, adjectives agree with nouns, verbs are marked for person and number and agree with the subject and the word order is in most cases Subject-Verb-Object etc.

For someone native to one of the Romance languages, the Italian language proves to be a familiar and simple language to learn. But, learning to speak Italian seems to be very well loved with those who speak English as well as other Germanic languages.

Brought To You By : Italian Phrases

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