Italian language

Italian
Italiano, lingua italiana
Pronunciation[itaˈljaːno]
Native to
EthnicityItalians
SpeakersL1: 65 million (2022)[1]
L2: 3.1 million[1]
Total: 68 million[1]
Early forms
Dialects
Latin script (Italian alphabet)
Italian Braille
Italiano segnato "(Signed Italian)"[2]
italiano segnato esatto "(Signed Exact Italian)"[3]
Official status
Official language in


Recognised minority
language in
Regulated byAccademia della Crusca (de facto)
Language codes
ISO 639-1it
ISO 639-2ita
ISO 639-3ita
Glottologital1282
Linguasphere51-AAA-q
Geographical distribution of the Italian language in Europe:
  Areas where it is the majority language
  Areas where it is a minority language or where it was the majority in the past
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Italian (italiano, Italian: [itaˈljaːno] , or lingua italiana, Italian: [ˈliŋɡwa itaˈljaːna]) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. Italian is the least divergent Romance language from Latin, together with Sardinian.[6][7][8][9] Spoken by about 85 million people including 67 million native speakers (2024),[10] Italian is an official language in Italy, San Marino, and Switzerland (Ticino and the Grisons), and is the primary language of Vatican City. It has official minority status in Croatia and in some areas of Slovenian Istria.

Paola, a speaker of Italian and Sicilian. Recorded in Italy.

Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia.[1] Italian is included under the languages covered 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.[5][11] Some speakers of Italian are native bilinguals of both Italian (either in its standard form or regional varieties) and a local language of Italy, most frequently the language spoken at home in their place of origin.[1]

Italian is a major language in Europe, being one of the official languages of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and one of the working languages of the Council of Europe. It is 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 a second language by 13.4 million EU citizens (3%).[12][13] Including Italian speakers in non-EU European countries (such as Switzerland, Albania and the United Kingdom) and on other continents, the total number of speakers is approximately 85 million.[14] Italian is the main working language of the Holy See, serving as the lingua franca (common language) in the Roman Catholic hierarchy as well as the official language of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Italian has a significant use in musical terminology and opera with numerous Italian words referring to music that have become international terms taken into various languages worldwide.[15] Almost all native Italian words end with vowels and has a 7-vowel sound system ('e' and 'o' have mid-low and mid-high sounds). Italian has contrast between short and long consonants and gemination (doubling) of consonants.

  1. ^ a b c d e Italian at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) Closed access icon
  2. ^ "Centro documentazione per l'integrazione". Cdila.it. Retrieved 22 October 2015.
  3. ^ "Centro documentazione per l'integrazione". Cdila.it. Retrieved 22 October 2015.
  4. ^ "Pope Francis to receive Knights of Malta grand master Thursday – English". ANSA.it. 21 June 2016. Retrieved 16 October 2019.
  5. ^ a b "Languages covered by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages" (PDF). (PDF)
  6. ^ "Romance languages". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 19 February 2017. ...if the Romance languages are compared with Latin, it is seen that by most measures Sardinian and Italian are least differentiated...
  7. ^ Fleure, H. J. The peoples of Europe. Рипол Классик. ISBN 9781176926981.
  8. ^ "Hermathena". 1942.
  9. ^ Winters, Margaret E. (8 May 2020). Historical Linguistics: A cognitive grammar introduction. John Benjamins Publishing Company. ISBN 9789027261236.
  10. ^ "World Population Review". 2024.
  11. ^ "MULTILINGVISM ŞI LIMBI MINORITARE ÎN ROMÂNIA" (PDF) (in Romanian). Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 December 2019. Retrieved 13 June 2019.
  12. ^ Keating, Dave. "Despite Brexit, English Remains The EU's Most Spoken Language By Far". Forbes. Retrieved 7 February 2020.
  13. ^ Europeans and their Languages Archived 6 January 2016 at the Wayback Machine, Data for EU27, published in 2012.
  14. ^ "Italian — University of Leicester". .le.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 2 May 2014. Retrieved 22 October 2015.
  15. ^ See List of Italian musical terms used in English


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