Italian Written Language

Italian speaking areas:

• Italy
• Sardinia
• Sicily
• San marino

• Vatican
• Southern Switzerland (Grigioni and Ticino cantons)
• Immigrant groups in 27 other countries also use Italian. These countries include Argentina, Australia, United States, Germany, Venezuela and Brazil.

Italian spoken dialects:

• Dialects: There are many spoken dialects of Italian, nearly one per city. Some of the dialects are so different from the standard form, that many linguists would consider them to be separate languages.

Languages of Italy

The standard Italian language is based on Tuscan, specifically on its Florentine variety (the dialect spoken by Dante Alighieri, in his masterpiece "The Divine Comedy"written in the 14th century), and the majority of the languages in Italy do not derive from Tuscan but directly from Latin. Therefore these cannot be considered neither dialects of Italian nor of Latin, on the contrary they are separate languages.

Some examples of these languages include: Siciliano (Sicilian, Sicily), Campano (Neapolitan and others in the region Campania), Sassarese (North Western Sardinian), Franco Provenzale (Franco-Provençal, Aosta Valley, Piedmont, Calabria, Apulia), Veneto (Venetian) and Ladino (Ladin , Rhaeto-Romansh,Trentino-South Tyrol, Friuli-Venezia Giulia).

Dialects of Italy

Besides the standard Italian language and the other languages described above, many other dialects, which derive from Latin, are spoken in Italy, some easier to comprehend than others. Most are extremely localised and people living in different nearby towns have trouble understanding each other.

The spread of free public education and the influence of media (radio, television, newspapers) in the twentieth century led to most Italians being able to speak the standard Italian language but admitted a number of words from other dialects. Government surveys in Italy found that most Italian people speak standard Italian at school or at work, but still speak their own regional dialect at home.

Also, Italians moving around the country to find work (and marrying people from other regions) and the ever-growing influence of the media have led to a decline in regional vernaculars, especially among young people.

Some of the dialects you might hear spoken are listed below.

• Molisano (Molise)
• Laziale (Latium)
• Umbrian (Umbria)
• Apuliese (Apulia)
• Abruzzese (Abruzzo)
• Marchigiano (The Marches)
• Romanesque (Romano, Rome)
• Cicolan-Reatin-Acquitan (Central Italy)

Written and Spoken Italian

There is only one form of written Italian which is used throughout all Italian speaking areas (listed above).

The Italian alphabet has 21 letters - the 26 of English, minus J, K, W, X, and Y. These letters appear in Italian writing when used for foreign names and words, but not for the standard Italian vocabulary.

For English quotation marks " ", << >> are used in Italian.

"G" is hard except before "i" and "e." Hence the soft "g" sound in "giovani." By inserting an "h" the "g" goes hard, as in "ghiro." The same occurs with "c," which is hard (like a "k") unless it comes before "i" or "e," in which event, an "h" solves the problem. Therefore "ci" is pronounced "CHI" and "chi" is pronounced "KEY."

The acute accent and the grave accent.

Sometimes an Italian word will end in an accented vowel: this indicates that the stress falls on that final vowel. For example the words città, perché, caffè, così, andò and lassù. These accents are part of the standard spelling of a word and are never omitted. The type of accent indicates whether it is an open or closed vowel: the acute accent (é, ó) indicates a closed vowel and the grave accent (è, ò) indicates an open vowel.

The normal rule in Italian for stress is to accent the penultimate syllable. If the ultimate syllable is stressed, an accent mark is employed. However, if the stress should be on the antepenultimate syllable (third from the end), Italian does not always mark it for the reader. Much of the time you are just supposed to know whether or not the word is stressed on the antepenultimate (or sometimes even the praeantepenultimate!). For example "dimenticare" (forget) is a normal, penult-stressed word. Its third person plural is "dimenticano." The stress is on the "e" in the praeantepenultimate position. Examples of the antepenultimate are "vongole" (clams) and "ostriche" (oysters), each stressed on its initial vowel. When a word can be pronounced either way, and have a distinct meaning (as in the words for "princes" and "principles"), the accent is employed.

The consonant "h" is present in written Italian, but is never pronounced, even in words adopted from other languages, such as "hotel." It is used internally to harden "g" and "c" before "i" and "e" and it is used as an initial to distinguish certain forms of the auxiliary verb "avere" (have = "ho," "hai," "ha," "hanno") from homophones ("o" = or, "a" = to) and the word "anno" = year).

The "z" in Italian is the "ds" or "ts" sound. "Zanzara" (mosquito) has two of the softer "z" sounds and "Zingara" (gypsy) is usually pronounced with the harder initial "z".

Italian accents

To type accents with ALT codes, hold down the ALT key, then on the numeric keypad type the three or four digits listed here. However not with laptops, ALT codes only work with the numeric keypad, NOT the row of numbers across the top of your keyboard, as on laptops.

Italian Alphabet

The "GL" occurs only before the letter "i" and never at the beginning of a word, other than "gli," a personal pronoun and plural article.

Accents may be replaced with adjacent apostrophes. For example: in perche' instead of perché. The practice is common for uppercase accented letters. Uppercase <È> is rare and is absent from the Italian keyboard layout. It's often substituted with <E>, even though there are several ways of producing the uppercase È on a computer.

Beyond the above information, Italian is transcribed essentially as it is pronounced, given clear enunciation and compliance with the foregoing rules of orthography. Writing phonetically is so natural to Italians that often they find it hard to understand how spoken English can depart so much from the way it is written.

Italian language

Italian is very similar to Spanish with both being able to understand their written languages and even with French. Both as a result of invassions and subsequent influence.

Swiss Italian

The map to the right shows the Italian speaking part of Switzerland (Southern Switzerland). For more information on the languages spoken in Switzerland, click on the map

Written Italian is used in Southern Switzerland (two cantons: Ticino and Grigioni), with no difference to normal Italian. When spoken there is a slight difference in dialect, which is only noticeable to Italian speakers.

The Italian speakers (Ticinesi) tend to speak Swiss German as well as Italian (Ticinesi dialect-local and the North Italian dialect-Lombardic).

In the Grigioni Canton, Italian speakers live alongside Romansch speakers.

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