Italian

The Romance language that stayed nearest its parent, and that almost nobody in Italy spoke when Italy was founded.

• At unification in 1861 only a small minority of the population could speak the standard language. Television, not schooling, finished the job a century later.
• The standard is based on the Florentine of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, so modern Italy speaks a fourteenth-century literary dialect.
• Seven vowels, all pure, none of them sliding. It is why Italian is the easiest major language to read aloud correctly.
• Double consonants change meaning. Copia is a copy, coppia is a couple, and the difference is holding the sound.
• It has more or less kept the Latin vocabulary intact, so acqua, notte and tempo are readable to anyone who has met Latin.
• The pronoun is optional because the verb ending already says who: voglio un caffè needs no io in front of it.
• Adjectives usually come after the noun, and moving one in front changes the sense. Un vecchio amico is a friend of long standing; un amico vecchio is a friend who is old.
• Two tenses carry most conversation, the present and the passato prossimo. The rest of the system can wait months without anyone noticing.
• What Italy calls dialects are separate Romance languages, not accents. Sardinian is further from Italian than Spanish is, and Neapolitan and Sicilian have their own literatures.
• Whole regions run on another language: German in South Tyrol, French in the Aosta Valley, Friulian and Slovene in the north east, with Albanian and Greek pockets in the south. Twelve minority languages are protected by law.
• When an Italian understands nothing, the language blamed is Arabic: per me è arabo. The older version blamed a people that stopped existing in the sixth century: parlare ostrogoto.

The language opera was built in, where the grammar sings even when you are ordering coffee. The most studied language on Earth relative to its size, and entirely for pleasure. Food, opera, Renaissance art, and a country where speaking the language upgrades every single interaction from transaction to theatre.

All the untranslatable words →

Where Italian parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.

Italian vs Romanian → Italian vs Moldovan → Italian vs Spanish →

Italian in the archive, next to the other sixty-six →