About 63 million people use Italian every day, which makes it the 21st most widespread language in the world. Surprisingly, it didn’t originate from classical Latin but from Vulgar Latin, a version of the language that was used by ordinary people such as farmers and city dwellers during the fall of the Roman Empire.
Italian is a Romance language that developed from Vulgar Latin during the fall of the Roman Empire. The Divine Comedy by Dante was the first work in Italian.
Want to know more about Italian? Today I’ve collected some fascinating facts about this beautiful language.
Here are 15 interesting and surprising facts about Italian.
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1. Italy has a lot of dialects, more than 30 in fact! According to the Italian encyclopaedia Treccani, counting them accurately is a challenge. In order to categorise them better, scholars divide the country into three main dialect regions: The line from La Spezia to Rimini marks the border between the north and the centre, which in turn is separated from the south by the line from Rome to Ancona.
2. Besides dialects, Italy also has local languages from which a variety of dialects developed. According to Ethnologue, Neapolitan is the most widely spread, with 5.7 million Italians speaking it as their mother tongue. This is followed by Sicilian (4.7 million speakers), Venetian (3.8 million), Lombard (3.6 million) and Piedmontese (1.6 million). The smallest number of speakers is in Molise, with only 1000 people.
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3. In 1861, the year the Kingdom of Italy was founded, 80% of the population was illiterate and only 8.9 out of every thousand people finished primary school. One hundred years later, in 1961, the illiteracy rate was less than 9%. By 1971, it had fallen to just over 5%. In 2001, according to Istat, it was down to 2%.
4. Italian schools teach the generally accepted standard of the Italian language (Italiano standard). However, in daily life, especially among the younger generation, a more colloquial form known as “neoitaliano” prevails, which doesn’t always follow the “correct” grammatical rules (for example, the subjunctive is often replaced by the imperfect).
5. Italian words typically end with a vowel, with the exception of certain articles and prepositions.
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6. Most musical terms come from Italian, including Adagio, Aria, Concerto, Maestro, Opera, Primadonna, Serenade, Sonata, Soprano, and Piano.
7. All words in the Italian language containing the letters J, K, W, X, and Y are borrowed: Jeans, Taxi, Whisky.
8. Italian does not have a specific word for “hangover”. Instead, the term is translated with a descriptive phrase – dopo aver bevuto troppo (after drinking too much).
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9. Italian follows the principle of “write as you speak”, with every letter pronounced exactly as written. This makes language learning significantly easier. However, pronunciation may vary from one region to another and has its own peculiarities.
10. Italian has a total of 15 tenses. However, only Tuscans use the Passato Remoto (past tense) and Passato Prossimo (recent past tense) correctly. In other regions, the Passato Remoto is used in official documents only, while the Passato Prossimo is more casual.
11. The longest colloquial word in Italian is “precipitevolissimevolmente,” which can be translated as “very quickly.”
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12. Italian has the shortest alphabet among European languages, with only 21 letters.
13. Italians place great importance on greetings, often accompanied by kisses and handshakes. Italians often say “bella, bello” (beautiful, handsome) and “cara, caro” (dear, darling) even with casual acquaintances.
14. Italian has a great similarity in vocabulary with French (89%), Catalan (88%), Sardinian (85%), Spanish and Portuguese (82%) and Romanian (77%).
15.This is considered to be one of the most tricky tonguetwisters: “TrentatrĂ© trentini entrarono a Trento, tutti e trentatrĂ© trotterellando”, which means: “33 people from Trento entered the city, all 33 trotting”.
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