Before the development of the Roman Republic is the Etruscan was spoken in Tuscany and northern Lazio. If the Etruscan language did not survive the immense influence What would then the Latin , it has perhaps influenced the Tuscan (as substrate ). However, too many facts (date of last certificate of the use of the Etruscan cons of a Romance language in Tuscany, for example) make it difficult to confirm this hypothesis. In contrast, the Etruscan influenced the Latin as' adstratum : the Etruscan alphabet was the basis for the Latin alphabet and many common words are of Etruscan origin (like the word "letter").

During the Roman conquest, the life of Italy - like most of Western and Central Europe - then spoke Latin. Given the time of Roman rule, Latin was the strain of many European languages, Romance languages and strongly influenced the other. After the fall of the Roman Empire of the West in 476 , lives in Tuscany arrive Ostrogoths and Lombards ( ^fifth and ^sixth centuries ), the Germanic peoples from eastern and northern Europe. They n'influencrent little language ( superstrate ). The first traces of writing in Italian back in the late tenth century, but it was not until four centuries later that the language was formalized.

Worldwide presence

It is estimated that worldwide about 200 million people speak, study, or would like to learn Italian. Italian is spoken mainly in Italy (and San Marino ), where he is the national language, but also in Switzerland mainly in the south ( Ticino and Graubnden ) national language (it represents about 6.8% of Swiss speakers). At the Vatican , he is second official language with the Latin.

In addition, there are many Italian-speaking communities in Croatia ( Istria and Dalmatia ), in Slovenia and the former Yugoslavia. In Slovenia, there is language in some cities, including Capodistria / Koper , Croatia is an official in Istria , especially in the towns of Porec / Porec , Pola / Pula , Umago / Umag and Rovigno / Rovinj.

It is also spoken in France ( Corsica , the Corsican , Ausbau language , is closely related to Tuscan , to Nice to Menton and royasque Valley of the Roya , at Monaco ), in Malta (where she was an official language until 1934 ), in Albania , the United States (about 4 million speakers, especially in large cities), in South America ( Argentina , Brazil , Uruguay in particular, Ethiopia , in Eritrea in Libya (she is the business language with English) and Somalia (she has been academic language until 1991).

The Italian seems to have greatly influenced the Spanish as spoken in Argentina where the influx of Italian migrants has been massive.

Italian is a language cultivated and refined, very challenging for a foreign audience that is interested in Italy for study purposes, family traditions, or curiosity. Italian is the image of Italy.

Secondly, if the Italian has established itself worldwide as the language of art, he did not suffer under the linguistic influences of two other dominant cultures: English and French.

Instruments of promoting the Italian language in the world

Radio-televised Italian-speaking Community

April 3, 1985 constituted institutional collaboration between PSB-Rai, RTSI, RTV Koper, Koper, Radio Vatican and San Marino Rtv-born Italian-speaking community radio and television as a tool for recovery of the Italian language. Today its articulated structure can be illustrated by a diagram of three circles: the first circle is formed by the founder members, while the second includes all media "observatories", recorded and finally the third circle includes "Friends", c ' is to say, this table ambient humus promotes growth of the Community.

Cellini

The Italian today, after dropping the rigidity of a written language of high culture, is currently extending a more careful and more sensitive to oral conditions and opportunities for individual expression. It is, therefore, a language more flexible and rich who often uses neologisms, regional expressions or particular buildings, in any case all of which carry serious emotional and semantic values. Cellini School, founded in 2001, proposes to disclose the Italian language in faraway countries such as Japan. Not being a school, came into existence for mere mercantile reasons, its purpose is rather to provide a virtual window on Italy, to be a portal giving access to the beauties of language and depth Italian Culture across borders

Writing

Italian uses 21 letters of the Latin alphabet. The letters j, k, w, x and y are used only in loan words. It is, however, d (i lunga) and the y (i greca or ipsilon) and w (doppia vu) in some place names and names or surnames.

The vowels can carry accents acute or severe (mostly) marking accented syllables phonetically. The words do not bear graphic accents on the last syllable, or in rare cases on other syllables to avoid disambiguation (eg "the", feminine singular article, and "there", adverb of place ). It is never mandatory to mark the written accent on a syllable that is not the last word. The large number of French loans are often written without the accents, however, this is a spelling error condemned by the purists of the Italian language.

There are several conventions for writing graphic accents.

The simplest is to mark the grave accents everywhere, regardless of the pronunciation of the vowel. Thus the name of the actor Gian Maria Volont may as well be written "Will" - which does not affect the pronunciation.

The agreement put forward by the poet Carducci Giosu provides that the acute accent to write the vowels, the pronunciation is always closed (, ), grave accent in the pronunciation of which is still open, and the focus corresponding to the openness of the pronunciation for the e and o, ie, E & E O and O.

According to the convention adopted de facto by the publications in Italian, is a grave accent mark on all but e and o corresponding to a pronunciation closed. Long as there is no native word ending with an O, so no word where it would be mandatory to mark the accent graphics, no use to finally score some rare homographs such boot " barrel, vs. bunch, "hits" or articolatri, plural of articolatre (articulator) vs. articolatri, plural of articolatrio (articulatory).

It is important to note that the convention is the simplest orthographically correct only if it is applied in a rigorous way, that is to say, if we write acute accents on foreign words borrowed.

An acute accent mark on a is still a spelling error, except in a borrowed word.

Spelling

As the Croatian , the Spanish , the Czech , the Occitan and Romanian , Italian has an almost flawless transparency in grapheme-phoneme transcription. According to Claude Piron , "In Switzerland , Italian language students write properly at the end of the first year of primary education, while young French still do not write properly at the age of 12-13 years. Why? Because the spelling of Italian is simple, consistent, while that of French contains an impressive number of arbitrary forms that must be saved with the word, without being able to trust the way he pronounces " .

Phonetics and pronunciation

The International Phonetic Alphabet for Italian describes all the sounds used in the Italian language. It owes its sound to its particular vowel (preserving vowel final, even dull, and drop consonants finals) and its geminate consonants (double consonants). The main stress is usually placed on the penultimate syllable, but also very often on the penultimate for words of three syllables or more. In many cases, very small minority, it moves to the last syllable: in this case, the last letter must include a written accent grave or acute. In some verb forms such as ^the 3rd person plural, the accent falls on the syllable before the antepenultimate located: (abitano Grammar

History

Regional variants

Dialects

Dialects of Italy ^{, ,}

.

The many dialects Italian novels can be classified by their common linguistic strains. Thus, they are all from Latin , but the language before the Roman domination, the substrates are different in different regions and have often conditioned the evolution of dialects. Some linguists even say that every region, every city see each village has its own dialect or more distinct compared to the national language.

North-Italian

The northern dialects, also called North Italian, northern Italian and more recently Padan (or very rarely Cisalpine) form a dialect group in the original Italian ensemble.

The language Roman considers traditional dialects of northern Italy as part of the Italian language. But the difference between Italian and Northern Italian central-southern boundary is marked by a clear language: it is a beam isoglosses importantly, Massa-Senigallia Line (called a less accurate La Spezia-Rimini line ), which corresponds at break of the Romance languages into two main groups: the western Romania and eastern Romania.

This leads some linguists (minority) to consider that the northern Italian , sometimes called Italian or North Padan, is an independent language from Italian itself. Some even claim cultural movements the language tag for each of these dialects, but this view has much less echo among linguists (except perhaps for the Piedmont , which has acquired a cultural codification and Dynan quite advanced compared other northern varieties).

Here dialectological classification of dialects of northern Italy.

• Gallo-Italian or Gallo-Italian (substrate Celtic , a common mistake is to confuse the Gallo-Italic with all the north-Italian, when in fact it is a part):
  • Piedmont ( Piemonte , Torino )
  • Lombardy ( Lombardia , Milan , southern Switzerland , Ticino , Lake Maggiore)
  • Ligurian Ligurian or or genoa (including enclaves in Monaco , to Bonifacio and the islands of San Pietro and Sant'Antioco in Sardinia , which is also the intmlien Region Ventimiglia )
    • royasque ( brigasque brigasque included), talk about high Roya , transition Occitan
  • Emilia Romagna ( Emilia-Romagna , Bologna , Modena , Parma , Piacenza , northern Marche , San Marino )
• Venetian ( Venice , Padua , Verona , Trento )
• Istriote (south coast of Istria in Croatia ), classification difficult and controversial. Be seen as a particularly Venetian, either as a distinct dialect of the Venetian, or as an intermediary between the Venetian dialect and the Dalmatian.

Italian central-southern

Central-southern dialects and Italian central-southern

• Tuscan dialects (substrate Etruscan hypothetical)
  • Tuscany (Florence, Pisa, Siena), dialect forming the basis of the standard Italian
  • Corsican (diasystem classified in Italian, but constituting a language development )
    • cismontano ( Corsican : Bastia )
    • oltramontano (Corsica: Ajaccio and northern islands of Sardinia )
    • Gallurese (north-east of Sardinia, separate from Sardinia )
  • sassari (language transition with the Sardinian) (north-west of Sardinia , separate from the Sardinian and Corsican )

• Southern dialects
  • Centre:
    • Rome ( Lazio ), different from Romanesco, the dialect spoken in Tuscany Rome
    • Umbria ( Umbria )
    • marchigiano (dialects of Marche )
  • South (substrates Oscan and / or Messapian ):
    • Abruzzo ( Abruzzi )
    • molisien ( Molise )
    • Apulian (north and center of Apulia )
    • Campania ( Naples , Neapolitan ) or southern
    • lucan or Lucano Potenza , two varieties
  • Far South (substrate Greek ):
    • Salento (southern Puglia )
    • Calabria ( Calabria )
    • Sicilian ( Sicily ), also substrate Arabic

Examples

References

See also