Italianlanguage

Italian is a Romance language of the Italo-Dalmatian branch, descended from Latin spoken in the Italian Peninsula. It is the national language of Italy and San Marino, and one of the official languages of Vatican City and Switzerland; it is widely spoken in communities abroad and used in media and education.

The language developed from Vulgar Latin, with the Tuscan dialect forming the basis of Standard Italian. The literary tradition of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio helped establish Tuscan as a prestige dialect by the 14th century. The unification era in the 19th century promoted a standardized form; today Standard Italian is taught in schools and used in formal writing and broadcasting, while regional varieties remain widely spoken.

Italian has numerous regional dialects that can be mutually unintelligible; main groups include Northern Lombard and Venetian varieties, Emilian, Central Romanesco, and Southern Neapolitan and Sicilian. Dialects often coexist with Standard Italian, especially in informal speech. Italian Sign Language serves the Deaf community, and Italy recognizes minority languages such as Sardinian and Friulian alongside Italian.

The writing system uses the Latin alphabet of 21 letters, with diacritics for vowels where needed; j, k, w, x, and y appear mainly in loanwords. Italian orthography is relatively phonemic, though some correspondences are irregular. The language has many loanwords from other languages and is one of the official languages of the European Union.