Italian

Italian belongs to the Romance branch of the Indo-European language family. Like the other Romance languages, it is a descendant of Vulgar Latin spoken by the Romans and imposed by them on the peoples under their rule. As such, is shares many characteristics with other Romance languages. It is spoken by an estimated 62 million speakers worldwide, 55 million of them in Italy, and the rest in 29 other countries (Ethnologue).

Italian is the official or co-official language of Italy, San Marino, Vatican City, Switzerland, and some areas of Slovenia and Croatia. It is widely spoken in Malta, Corsica, Albania, Luxembourg, Germany, and Belgium. In the Americas, it is spoken in the United States, Canada, Venezuela, Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina.

Dialects
The proliferation of regional dialects in Italy is due to its long history of separation into many small states and colonisation by France, Spain and Austria-Hungary between the fall of the Roman Empire and Italian reunification in 1861. During this period, the official language of most Italian states was either Latin or the language of the colonising power.

During the 14th century, the Tuscan dialect began to predominate because of the central position of Tuscany in Italy, and because of the economic power of its most important city, Florence. It was not until the 19th century, however, that the language spoken by educated Tuscans spread to become the standard language of a newly unified Italy. With progressive increases in literacy, standard Italian became gradually accepted as the national language in the 1950s.

Italian dialects form a continuum of intelligibility, although geographically distant dialects not mutually intelligible. In modern Italy, people communicate mostly in regional dialects, although standard Italian is the only written language. It is estimated that about half of Italy's population does not speak standard Italian as a native language. Most speakers of regional Italian dialects come in contact with standard Italian in elementary school.

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