| ITALIAN LANGUAGE
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SOME FACTS
Italian language, member of the Romance
group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European
family of languages (see Romance languages).
The official language of Italy and San Marino,
and one of the official languages of Switzerland,
Italian is spoken by about 58 million people
in Italy, 24,000 in San Marino, 840,000
in Switzerland, another 1 million in other
European countries, and approximately 5
million in North and South America. Historically,
Italian is a daughter language of Latin
(see Latin language). Northern Italian dialects
are the Gallo-Italian—including Piedmontese,
Ligurian, Lombard, and Emilian—and
Venetian. Further south, the major dialects
are Tuscan and various others from Umbria
to Sicily. Sardinian, spoken on the island
of Sardinia, is sufficiently distinct from
other dialects to be considered by some
a Romance language in its own right. The
Rhaeto-Romance forms, similar to the dialects
of northern Italy, are spoken in the border
region between Italy and Switzerland. It
is not known exactly when Italian could
be distinguished from its parent tongue;
however, no text in Italian is recorded
before the 10th cent. A.D.
The idiom of Florence, one of the Tuscan
dialects of Italian, became dominant from
the end of the 13th cent. to the middle
of the 14th cent., largely owing to the
growing prestige of the city of Florence
and the literary works written in the Florentine
dialect during that period. These literary
works included Dante's Divine Comedy and
the vernacular writings of Petrarch and
Boccaccio. Thus, although Italian had—and
still has—a great many dialects, it
was the culturally important idiom of Florence
that in time gave rise to modern standard
Italian. The dialect of the Italian capital,
Rome, also has influenced modern standard
Italian. The Roman alphabet is used for
Italian. The employment of diacritics is
limited to the grave and acute accents,
which sometimes serve to make clear where
the stress of a word is to fall (as in caffe=“coffee”);
they also serve to distinguish between homonyms
(as with ne=“of it” or “of
them,” but ne...ne=“neither...nor”).
The pronunciation of the language follows
the spelling very closely. Italian is often
described both as the language of art and
music and as the language best suited to
singing. Since the Renaissance its general
cultural importance has been considerable.
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