History of the Italian Language

Rightly classified under the Romance languages in the Indo-European family of languages, Italian is one of the most melodic and enchanting languages in the history of the world. This obviously explains why people from all over the world, for many centuries, have strived to learn and master it. Originally derived from Latin, the Italian language is also most closely related to Latin, among all the other Romance languages.

Dialects

Though Italian stems from Latin, the evolution itself took a course of hundred years, resulting in a gamut of different dialects. Whilst all dialects fall under the broad classification of ‘Italian’, they can be quite hard to recognize since the variations are distinctly different from the original. Some of the different versions are spoken on the islands of Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily - regions that are completely separated from the mainland by water. A group of dialects in the northwestern and northern regions of Italy are known as Gallo-Italian, which display the influence of French spoken in the north.

The Tuscan dialect is probably the most well-known of all Italian dialects, given that Tuscany became central to Italy’s commercial and diplomatic positions in the 14th and 15th centuries. The Tuscan dialect also most resembles Latin and was preferred by the philosophers, writers and politicians of the time, who always preferred Latin over any other language. Some of the famous works in the Tuscan dialect are Dante’s Divine Comedy and Petrarca’s Canzoniere, which gained world-wide acclaim. With the formal unification of Italy in 1861, the Tuscan dialect became the official language of the Italian nation. Some Italian is also spoken in countries that are former Italian colonies, such as Abyssinia, Eritrea and Somalia in Africa.

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