Italian language

Italian (italiano or lingua italiana ) is a Romance language. Italian, together with Sardinian, is by most measures the closest language to Vulgar Latin of the Romance languages. Italian is an official language in Italy, Switzerland (where is the first language in Canton of Ticino), San Marino, Vatican City and western Istria. It formerly had official status in Malta and it is still understood in Monaco and to some extent in Corsica (also due to the similarities with the Corsican language) and Savoie. It used to be an official language, even if not a native language for the most of the population, in the former Italian East Africa and Italian North Africa. Italian is also spoken by large expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia. It also has official minority status in Croatia and Slovenia. Many speakers are native bilinguals of both standardized Italian and other regional languages.

Italian is a major European language, being one of the official languages of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and one of the working languages of the Council of Europe. It is the fourth most widely spoken first language in the European Union with 69 million native speakers (13% of the EU population) and it is spoken as a second language by 16 million EU citizens (3%). Including Italian speakers in non-EU European countries (such as Switzerland and Albania) and on other continents, the total number of speakers is around 90 million. Italian is the main working language of the Holy See, serving as the lingua franca (common language) in the Roman Catholic hierarchy as well as the official language of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Italian is known as the language of music because of its use in musical terminology and opera. Its influence is also widespread in the arts and in the luxury goods market. Italian has been reported as the fourth or fifth most frequently taught foreign language in the world.

Italian was adopted by the state after the Unification of Italy, having previously been a literary language based on Tuscan as spoken mostly by the upper class of Florentine society. Its development was also influenced by other Italian languages and to some minor extent, by the Germanic languages of the post-Roman invaders. The incorporation into Italian of learned words from its own ancestor language, Latin, is another form of lexical borrowing through the influence of written language, scientific terminology and the liturgical language of the Church. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, most literate Italians were also literate in Latin; and thus they easily adopted Latin words into their writing—and eventually speech—in Italian. Its vowels are the second-closest to Latin after Sardinian. As in most Romance languages, stress is distinctive but, unlike most other Romance languages, Italian retains Latin's contrast between short and long consonants. Almost all words and syllables finish with pure vowels, a factor that makes Italian words extremely easy to use in rhyming. Italian has a 7 vowel sound system ('e' and 'o' have mid-low and mid-high sounds); Classical Latin had 10, 5 with short and 5 with long sounds.

Origins
During the Middle Ages, the established written language in Europe was Latin, though the great majority of people were illiterate, and only a handful were well versed in the language. In the Italian peninsula, as in most of Europe, most would instead speak a local vernacular. These dialects (as they are commonly referred to) were born from Vulgar Latin over the course of centuries, evolving naturally unaffected by formal standards and teachings. They are not in any sense "dialects of" standard Italian, that itself started off being one of these local tongues, but sister languages of Italian. Mutual intelligibility with Italian varies widely, as it does with Romance languages in general. The Romance dialects of Italy can differ greatly from Italian at all levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, pragmatics) and are classified typologically as distinct languages. The standard Italian language has a poetic and literary origin in the writings of Tuscan writers of the 12th century, and, even though the grammar and core lexicon are basically unchanged from those used in Florence in the 13th century, the modern standard of the language was largely shaped by relatively recent events. However, Romance vernacular as language spoken in the Apennine peninsula has a longer history. In fact, the earliest surviving texts that can definitely be called vernacular (as distinct from its predecessor Vulgar Latin) are legal formulae known as the Placiti Cassinesi from the Province of Benevento that date from 960–963, although the Veronese Riddle, probably from the 8th or early 9th century, contains a late form of Vulgar Latin that can be seen as a very early sample of a vernacular dialect of Italy.

The language that came to be thought of as Italian developed in central Tuscany and was first formalized in the early 14th century through the works of Tuscan writer Dante Alighieri, written in his native Florentine. Dante's epic poems, known collectively as the Commedia, to which another Tuscan poet Giovanni Boccaccio later affixed the title Divina, were read throughout the peninsula and his written dialect became the "canonical standard" that all educated Italians could understand. Dante is still credited with standardizing the Italian language. In addition to the widespread exposure gained through literature, the Florentine dialect also gained prestige due to the political and cultural significance of Florence at the time and the fact that it was linguistically an intermediate between the northern and the southern Italian dialects. Thus the dialect of Florence became the basis for what would become the official language of Italy.

Italian was progressively made an official language of most of the Italian states predating unification, slowly replacing Latin, even when ruled by foreign powers (like Spain in the Kingdom of Naples, or Austria in the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia), even though the masses kept speaking primarily their local vernaculars. Italian was also one of the many recognised languages in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Italy has always had a distinctive dialect for each city because the cities, until recently, were thought of as city-states. Those dialects now have considerable variety. As Tuscan-derived Italian came to be used throughout Italy, features of local speech were naturally adopted, producing various versions of regional Italian. The most characteristic differences, for instance, between Roman Italian and Milanese Italian are the gemination of initial consonants and the pronunciation of stressed "e", and of "s" in some cases: e.g. va bene "all right": is pronounced by a Roman (and by any standard Italian speaker),  by a Milanese (and by any speaker whose native dialect lies to the north of the La Spezia–Rimini Line); a casa "at home" is  for Roman and standard,  for Milanese and generally northern.

In contrast to the Gallo-Italic linguistic panorama of northern Italy, the Italo-Dalmatian Neapolitan and its related dialects were largely unaffected by the Franco-Occitan influences introduced to Italy mainly by bards from France during the Middle Ages, but after the Norman conquest of southern Italy, Sicily became the first Italian land to adopt Occitan lyric moods (and words) in poetry. Even in the case of Northern Italian languages, however, scholars are careful not to overstate the effects of outsiders on the natural indigenous developments of the languages.

The economic might and relatively advanced development of Tuscany at the time (Late Middle Ages) gave its language weight, though Venetian remained widespread in medieval Italian commercial life, and Ligurian (or Genoese) remained in use in maritime trade alongside the Mediterranean. The increasing political and cultural relevance of Florence during the periods of the rise of the Banco Medici, Humanism, and the Renaissance made its dialect, or rather a refined version of it, a standard in the arts.

Renaissance
The Renaissance era, known as il Rinascimento in Italian, was seen as a time of "rebirth", which is the literal meaning of both renaissance (from French) and rinascimento (Italian).



During this time, long-existing beliefs stemming from the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church began to be understood from new a perspectives as humanists—individuals who placed emphasis on the human body and its full potential—began to shift focus from the church to human beings themselves. Humanists began forming new beliefs in various forms: social, political, and intellectual. The ideals of the Renaissance were evident throughout the Protestant Reformation, which took place simultaneously with the Renaissance. The Protestant Reformation began with Martin Luther's rejection of the selling of indulgences by Johann Tetzel and other authorities within the Roman Catholic Church, resulting in Luther's eventual break-off from the Roman Catholic Church in the Diet of Worms. After Luther was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church, he founded what was then understood to be a sect of Catholicism, later referred to as Lutheranism. Luther's preaching in favor of faith and scripture rather than tradition led him to translate the Bible into many other languages, which would allow for people from all over Europe to read the Bible. Previously, the Bible was only written in Latin, but after the Bible was translated, it could be understood in many other languages, including Italian. The Italian language was able to spread even more with the help of Luther and the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg. The printing press facilitated the spread of Italian because it was able to rapidly produce texts, such as the Bible, and cut the costs of books which allowed for more people to have access to the translated Bible and new pieces of literature. The Roman Catholic Church was losing its control over the population, as it was not open to change, and there was an increasing number of reformers with differing beliefs.

Italian became the language used in the courts of every state in the Italian peninsula. The rediscovery of Dante's De vulgari eloquentia and a renewed interest in linguistics in the 16th century, sparked a debate that raged throughout Italy concerning the criteria that should govern the establishment of a modern Italian literary and spoken language. This discussion, known as questione della lingua (i. e., the problem of the language), ran through the Italian culture until the end of the 19th century, often linked to the political debate on achieving a united Italian state. Renaissance scholars divided into three main factions:
 * The purists, headed by Venetian Pietro Bembo (who, in his Gli Asolani, claimed the language might be based only on the great literary classics, such as Petrarch and some part of Boccaccio). The purists thought the Divine Comedy was not dignified enough because it used elements from non-lyric registers of the language.
 * Niccolò Machiavelli and other Florentines preferred the version spoken by ordinary people in their own times.
 * The courtiers, like Baldassare Castiglione and Gian Giorgio Trissino, insisted that each local vernacular contribute to the new standard.



A fourth faction claimed that the best Italian was the one that the papal court adopted, which was a mixture of the Tuscan and Roman dialects. Eventually, Bembo's ideas prevailed, and the foundation of the Accademia della Crusca in Florence (1582–1583), the official legislative body of the Italian language led to publication of Agnolo Monosini's Latin tome Floris italicae linguae libri novem in 1604 followed by the first Italian dictionary in 1612.

The continual advancements in technology plays a crucial role in the diffusion of languages. After the invention of the printing press in the fifteen century, the number of printing presses in Italy grew rapidly and by the year 1500 reached a total of 56, the biggest number of printing presses in all of Europe. This allowed to produce more pieces of literature at a lower cost and as the dominant language, Italian spread.

Modern era
An important event that helped the diffusion of Italian was the conquest and occupation of Italy by Napoleon in the early 19th century (who was himself of Italian-Corsican descent). This conquest propelled the unification of Italy some decades after and pushed the Italian language into a lingua franca used not only among clerks, nobility, and functionaries in the Italian courts but also by the bourgeoisie.

Contemporary times
Italian literature's first modern novel, I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) by Alessandro Manzoni, further defined the standard by "rinsing" his Milanese "in the waters of the Arno" (Florence's river), as he states in the preface to his 1840 edition.

After unification, a huge number of civil servants and soldiers recruited from all over the country introduced many more words and idioms from their home languages (ciao is derived from the Venetian word s-cia[v]o ("slave"), panettone comes from the Lombard word panetton, etc.). Only 2.5% of Italy's population could speak the Italian standardized language properly when the nation was unified in 1861.

Classification
Italian is a Romance language, and is therefore a descendant of Vulgar Latin (the spoken form of non-classical Latin). Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, especially its Florentine dialect, and is therefore an Italo-Dalmatian language, to which Sicilian and the extinct Dalmatian also belong, among a few others.

Unlike most other Romance languages, Italian retains Latin's contrast between short and long consonants. As in most Romance languages, stress is distinctive. In particular, among the Romance languages, Italian is the closest to Latin in terms of vocabulary. Lexical similarity is 89% with French, 87% with Catalan, 85% with Sardinian, 82% with Spanish, 78% with Ladin, 77% with Romanian and 70% with Portuguese.

One study analyzing the degree of differentiation of Romance languages in comparison to Latin (comparing phonology, inflection, discourse, syntax, vocabulary, and intonation) estimated that among the languages analyzed the distance between Italian and Latin is only higher than that between Sardinian and Latin.

Geographic distribution


Italian is an official language of Italy and San Marino and is spoken fluently by the majority of the countries' populations. Italian is the third most spoken language in Switzerland (after German and French), and its use has modestly declined since the 1970s. Italian is also used in administration and official documents in Vatican City.

Due to heavy Italian influence during the Italian colonial period, Italian is still understood by some in former colonies. Although it was the primary language in Libya since colonial rule, Italian greatly declined under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi, who expelled the Italian Libyan population and made Arabic the sole official language of the country. In Eritrea, Italian is at times used in commerce and the capital city Asmara still has one Italian-language school. Italian was also introduced to Somalia through colonialism and was the sole official language of administration and education during the colonial period but fell out of use after government, educational and economic infrastructure were destroyed in the Somali Civil War.

Although over 17 million Americans are of Italian descent, only a little over one million people in the United States speak Italian at home. Nevertheless, an Italian language media market does exist in the country.

Italian immigrants to South America have also brought a presence of the language to that continent. Italian is the second most spoken language in Argentina after the official language of Spanish, with over 1 million (mainly of the older generation) speaking it at home, and Italian has also influenced the dialect of Spanish spoken in Argentina and Uruguay, mostly in phonology, known as Rioplatense Spanish.

Education
Italian is widely taught in many schools around the world, but rarely as the first foreign language. Italian is the fourth most frequently taught foreign language in the world. In the 21st century, technology also allows for the continual spread of the Italian language, as people have new ways for one to learn how to speak, read, and write languages at their own pace and at any given time. For example, the free website and application Duolingo has 4.94 million English speakers learning the Italian language.

According to the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, every year there are more than 200,000 foreign students who study the Italian language; they are distributed among the 90 Institutes of Italian Culture that are located around the world, in the 179 Italian schools located abroad, or in the 111 Italian lecturer sections belonging to foreign schools where Italian is taught as a language of culture.

Influence and derived languages
From the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, thousands of Italians settled in Argentina, Uruguay, southern Brazil, and Venezuela, where they formed a physical and cultural presence.

In some cases, colonies were established where variants of regional languages of Italy were used, and some continue to use this regional language. Examples are Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, where Talian is used, and the town of Chipilo near Puebla, Mexico; each continues to use a derived form of Venetian dating back to the nineteenth century. Another example is Cocoliche, an Italian–Spanish pidgin once spoken in Argentina and especially in Buenos Aires, and Lunfardo.

Rioplatense Spanish, and particularly the speech of the city of Buenos Aires, has intonation patterns that resemble those of Italian languages because Argentina has had a continuous large influx of Italian settlers since the second half of the nineteenth century: initially primarily from northern Italy; then, since the beginning of the twentieth century, mostly from southern Italy.

Lingua franca
Starting in late medieval times in much of Europe and the Mediterranean, Latin was replaced as the primary commercial language by Italian language variants (especially Tuscan and Venetian). These variants were consolidated during the Renaissance with the strength of Italy and the rise of humanism and the arts.

During that period, Italy held artistic sway over the rest of Europe. It was the norm for all educated gentlemen to make the Grand Tour, visiting Italy to see its great historical monuments and works of art. It thus became expected to learn at least some Italian. In England, while the classical languages Latin and Greek were the first to be learned, Italian became the second most common modern language after French, a position it held until the late eighteenth century when it tended to be replaced by German. John Milton, for instance, wrote some of his early poetry in Italian.

Within the Catholic church, Italian is known by a large part of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and is used in substitution for Latin in some official documents.

Italian loanwords continue to be used in most languages in matters of art and music (especially classical music including opera), in the design and fashion industries, in some sports like football and especially, in culinary terms.

Dialects
Throughout Italy, regional variations of Standard Italian, called Regional Italian, are spoken. In Italy, almost all the other languages spoken as the vernacular — other than standard Italian and some languages spoken among immigrant communities — are often imprecisely called "Italian dialects", even though they are quite different, with some belonging to different linguistic branches. The only exceptions to this are twelve groups considered "historical language minorities", which are officially recognized as distinct minority languages by the law. On the other hand, Corsican (a language spoken on the French island of Corsica) is closely related to Tuscan, from which Standard Italian derives and evolved. The differences in the evolution of Latin in the different regions of Italy can be attributed to the presence of three other types of languages: substrata, superstrata, and adstrata. The most prevalent were substrata (the language of the original inhabitants), as the Italian dialects were most likely simply Latin as spoken by native cultural groups. Superstrata and adstrata were both less important. Foreign conquerors of Italy that dominated different regions at different times left behind little to no influence on the dialects. Foreign cultures with which Italy engaged in peaceful relations with, such as trade, had no significant influence either.

Regional differences can be recognized by various factors: the openness of vowels, the length of the consonants, and influence of the local language (for example, in informal situations the contraction ' replaces ' in the area of Rome for the infinitive "to go"; and  is what Venetians say for the infinitive "to go").

There is no definitive date when the various Italian variants of Latin—including varieties that contributed to modern Standard Italian—began to be distinct enough from Latin to be considered separate languages. One criterion for determining that two language variants are to be considered separate languages rather than variants of a single language is that they have evolved so that they are no longer mutually intelligible; this diagnostic is effective if mutual intelligibility is minimal or absent (e.g. in Romance, Romanian and Portuguese), but it fails in cases such as Spanish-Portuguese or Spanish-Italian, as native speakers of either pairing can understand each other well if they choose to do so. Nevertheless, on the basis of accumulated differences in morphology, syntax, phonology, and to some extent lexicon, it is not difficult to identify that for the Romance varieties of Italy, the first extant written evidence of languages that can no longer be considered Latin comes from the ninth and tenth centuries C.E. These written sources demonstrate certain vernacular characteristics and sometimes explicitly mention the use of the vernacular in Italy. Full literary manifestations of the vernacular began to surface around the 13th century in the form of various religious texts and poetry.Although these are the first written records of Italian varieties separate from Latin, the spoken language had likely diverged long before the first written records appear, since those who were literate generally wrote in Latin even if they spoke other Romance varieties in person.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the use of Standard Italian became increasingly widespread and was mirrored by a decline in the use of the dialects. An increase in literacy was one of the main driving factors (one can assume that only literates were capable of learning Standard Italian, whereas those who were illiterate had access only to their native dialect). The percentage of literates rose from 25% in 1861 to 60% in 1911, and then on to 78.1% in 1951. Tullio De Mauro, an Italian linguist, has asserted that in 1861 only 2.5% of the population of Italy could speak Standard Italian. He reports that in 1951 that percentage had risen to 87%. The ability to speak Italian did not necessarily mean it was in everyday use, and most people (63.5%) still usually spoke their native dialects. In addition, other factors such as mass emigration, industrialization, and urbanization, and internal migrations after World War II contributed to the proliferation of Standard Italian. The Italians who emigrated during the Italian diaspora beginning in 1861 were often of the uneducated lower class, and thus the emigration had the effect of increasing the percentage of literates, who often knew and understood the importance of Standard Italian, back home in Italy. A large percentage of those who had emigrated also eventually returned to Italy, often more educated than when they had left.

The Italian dialects have declined in the modern era, as Italy unified under Standard Italian and continues to do so aided by mass media, from newspapers to radio to television.

Phonology


Italian has a seven-vowel system, consisting of, as well as 23 consonants. Compared with most other Romance languages, Italian phonology is conservative, preserving many words nearly unchanged from Vulgar Latin. Some examples:
 * Italian ' "fourteen" < Latin (cf. Romanian /, Spanish ', French , Catalan and Portuguese catorze)
 * Italian settimana "week" < Latin (cf. Romanian săptămână, Spanish and Portuguese semana, French semaine, Catalan setmana)
 * Italian medesimo "same" < Vulgar Latin * (cf. Spanish mismo, Portuguese mesmo, French même, Catalan mateix; note that Italian usually uses the shorter stesso)
 * Italian guadagnare "to win, earn, gain" < Vulgar Latin * < Germanic (cf. Spanish ganar, Portuguese ganhar, French gagner, Catalan guanyar)

The conservativeness of Italian phonology is partly explained by its origin. Italian stems from a literary language that is derived from the 13th-century speech of the city of Florence in the region of Tuscany, and has changed little in the last 700 years or so. Furthermore, the Tuscan dialect is the most conservative of all Italian dialects, radically different from the Gallo-Italian languages less than 100 miles to the north (across the La Spezia–Rimini Line).

The following are some of the conservative phonological features of Italian, as compared with the common Western Romance languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, Catalan). Some of these features are also present in Romanian.
 * Little or no lenition of consonants between vowels, e.g. > vita "life" (cf. Romanian viață, Spanish vida, French vie),  > piede "foot" (cf. Spanish pie, French pied ).
 * Preservation of geminate consonants, e.g. >  anno "year" (cf. Spanish año, French an , Portuguese ano ).
 * Preservation of all Proto-Romance final vowels, e.g. > pace "peace" (cf. Romanian pace, Spanish paz, French paix ),  > otto "eight" (cf. Romanian opt, Spanish ocho, French huit ),  > feci "I did" (cf. Spanish hice, French fis ).
 * Preservation of most intertonic vowels (those between the stressed syllable and either the beginning or ending syllable). This accounts for some of the most noticeable differences, as in the forms quattordici and settimana given above.
 * Slower consonant development, e.g. > Italo-Western  > foglia  "leaf" (cf. Romanian foaie, Spanish hoja , French feuille ; but note Portuguese folha ).

Compared with most other Romance languages, Italian has a large number of inconsistent outcomes, where the same underlying sound produces different results in different words, e.g. > lasciare and lassare,  > cacciare and cazzare,  > sdrucciolare, druzzolare and ruzzolare,  > regina and reina,  >  and,  >  and. Although in all these examples the second form has fallen out of usage, the dimorphism is thought to reflect the several-hundred-year period during which Italian developed as a literary language divorced from any native-speaking population, with an origin in 12th/13th-century Tuscan but with many words borrowed from languages farther to the north, with different sound outcomes. (The La Spezia–Rimini Line, the most important isogloss in the entire Romance-language area, passes only about 20 miles to the north of Florence.)

Some other features that distinguish Italian from the Western Romance languages:
 * Latin becomes  rather than.
 * Latin becomes  rather than  or :  > otto "eight" (cf. Spanish ocho, French huit, Portuguese oito).
 * Vulgar Latin becomes cchi  rather than :  > occhio "eye" (cf. Portuguese olho, French oeil  < ); but Romanian ochi.
 * Final is not preserved, and vowel changes rather than  are used to mark the plural: amico, amici "male friend(s)", amica, amiche "female friend(s)" (cf. Romanian amic, amici,amică, amice, Spanish amigo(s) "male friend(s)", amiga(s) "female friend(s)");  → tre, sei "three, six" (cf. Romanian trei, șase, Spanish tres, seis).

Standard Italian also differs in some respects from most nearby Italian languages:
 * Perhaps most noticeable is the total lack of metaphony, though metaphony is a feature characterizing nearly every other Italian language.
 * No simplification of original, (which often became  elsewhere).

Assimilation
Italian phonotactics do not usually permit verbs and polysyllabic nouns to end with consonants, excepting poetry and song, so foreign words may receive extra terminal vowel sounds.

Writing system
The Italian alphabet is typically considered to consist of 21 letters. The letters j, k, w, x, y are traditionally excluded, though they appear in loanwords such as jeans, whisky, taxi, xenofobo, xilofono. The letter $\langlex\rangle$ has become common in standard Italian with the prefix extra-, although (e)stra- is traditionally used; it is also common to use of the Latin particle ex(-) to mean "former(ly)" as in: la mia ex ("my ex-girlfriend"), "Ex-Jugoslavia" ("Former Yugoslavia"). The letter $\langlej\rangle$ appears in the first name Jacopo and in some Italian place-names, such as Bajardo, Bojano, Joppolo, Jerzu, Jesolo, Jesi, Ajaccio, among others, and in Mar Jonio, an alternative spelling of Mar Ionio (the Ionian Sea). The letter $\langlej\rangle$ may appear in dialectal words, but its use is discouraged in contemporary standard Italian. Letters used in foreign words can be replaced with phonetically equivalent native Italian letters and digraphs: $\langlegi\rangle$, $\langlege\rangle$, or $\langlei\rangle$ for $\langlej\rangle$; $\langlec\rangle$ or $\langlech\rangle$ for $\langlek\rangle$ (including in the standard prefix kilo-); $\langleo\rangle$, $\langleu\rangle$ or $\langlev\rangle$ for $\langlew\rangle$; $\langles\rangle$, $\langless\rangle$, $\langlez\rangle$, $\langlezz\rangle$ or $\langlecs\rangle$ for $\langlex\rangle$; and $\langlee\rangle$ or $\langlei\rangle$ for $\langley\rangle$.
 * The acute accent is used over word-final $\langlee\rangle$ to indicate a stressed front close-mid vowel, as in perché "why, because". In dictionaries, it is also used over $\langleo\rangle$ to indicate a stressed back close-mid vowel (azióne). The grave accent is used over word-final $\langlee\rangle$ to indicate a front open-mid vowel, as in tè "tea". The grave accent is used over any vowel to indicate word-final stress, as in gioventù "youth". Unlike $\langleé\rangle$, which is a close-mid vowel, a stressed final $\langleo\rangle$ is always a back open-mid vowel (andrò), making $\langleó\rangle$ unnecessary outside of dictionaries. Most of the time, the penultimate syllable is stressed. But if the stressed vowel is the final letter of the word, the accent is mandatory, otherwise it is virtually always omitted. Exceptions are typically either in dictionaries, where all or most stressed vowels are commonly marked. Accents can optionally be used to disambiguate words that differ only by stress, as for prìncipi "princes" and princìpi "principles", or àncora "anchor" and ancóra "still/yet". For monosyllabic words, the rule is different: when two orthographically identical monosyllabic words with different meanings exist, one is accented and the other is not (example: è "is", e "and").
 * The letter $\langleh\rangle$ distinguishes ho, hai, ha, hanno (present indicative of avere "to have") from o ("or"), ai ("to the"), a ("to"), anno ("year"). In the spoken language, the letter is always silent. The $\langleh\rangle$ in ho additionally marks the contrasting open pronunciation of the $\langleo\rangle$. The letter $\langleh\rangle$ is also used in combinations with other letters. No phoneme exists in Italian. In nativized foreign words, the $\langleh\rangle$ is silent. For example, hotel and hovercraft are pronounced  and  respectively. (Where $\langleh\rangle$ existed in Latin, it either disappeared or, in a few cases before a back vowel, changed to : traggo "I pull" ← Lat. .)
 * The letters $\langles\rangle$ and $\langlez\rangle$ can symbolize voiced or voiceless consonants. $\langlez\rangle$ symbolizes or  depending on context, with few minimal pairs. For example: zanzara  "mosquito" and nazione  "nation". $\langles\rangle$ symbolizes  word-initially before a vowel, when clustered with a voiceless consonant ($\langlep, f, c, ch\rangle$), and when doubled; it symbolizes  when between vowels and when clustered with voiced consonants. Intervocalic $\langles\rangle$ varies regionally between  and, with  being more dominant in northern Italy and  in the south.
 * The letters $\langlec\rangle$ and $\langleg\rangle$ vary in pronunciation between plosives and affricates depending on following vowels. The letter $\langlec\rangle$ symbolizes when word-final and before the back vowels $\langlea, o, u\rangle$. It symbolizes  as in chair before the front vowels $\langlee, i\rangle$. The letter $\langleg\rangle$ symbolizes  when word-final and before the back vowels $\langlea, o, u\rangle$. It symbolizes  as in gem before the front vowels $\langlee, i\rangle$. Other Romance languages and, to an extent, English have similar variations for $\langlec, g\rangle$. Compare hard and soft C, hard and soft G. (See also palatalization.)
 * The digraphs $\langlech\rangle$ and $\langlegh\rangle$ indicate ( and ) before $\langlei, e\rangle$. The digraphs $\langleci\rangle$ and $\langlegi\rangle$ indicate softness ( and ) before $\langlea, o, u\rangle$. For example:


 * {| class="wikitable"

! ! colspan="2" | Before back vowel (A, O, U) ! colspan="2" | Before front vowel (I, E) ! rowspan="2" | Plosive ! C ! CH ! G ! GH ! rowspan="2" | Affricate ! CI ! C ! GI ! G
 * caramella candy
 * china India ink
 * gallo rooster
 * ghiro edible dormouse
 * ciambella donut
 * Cina China
 * giallo yellow
 * giro round, tour
 * }
 * Note: $\langleh\rangle$ is silent in the digraphs $\langlech\rangle$, $\langlegh\rangle$; and $\langlei\rangle$ is silent in the digraphs $\langleci\rangle$ and $\langlegi\rangle$ before $\langlea, o, u\rangle$ unless the $\langlei\rangle$ is stressed. For example, it is silent in ciao and cielo, but it is pronounced in farmacia  and farmacie.

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 * There are three other special digraphs in Italian: $\langlegn\rangle$, $\langlegl\rangle$ and $\langlesc\rangle$. The digraph $\langlegn\rangle$ represents . $\langlegl\rangle$ represents before $\langlei\rangle$, and never at the beginning of a word, except in the personal pronoun and definite article gli. An exception is the word glicerina ("glycerin"), which is pronounced with a hard $\langleg\rangle$. (Compare with Spanish $\langleñ\rangle$ and $\langlell\rangle$, Portuguese $\langlenh\rangle$ and $\langlelh\rangle$.) $\langlesc\rangle$ represents a fricative  before $\langlee, i\rangle$. Except in the speech of some Northern Italians, all of these are normally geminate between vowels.
 * In general, there is a clear one-to-one correspondence between letters or digraphs and phonemes, as in Spanish; in standard varieties of Italian, there is little allophonic variation. The most notable exceptions are assimilation of /n/ in point of articulation before consonants, assimilatory voicing of /s/ to following voiced consonants, and vowel length (vowels are long in stressed open syllables, except at the end of words, and short elsewhere) — compare with the substantial number of allophones of the English phoneme /t/. Spelling is mostly phonemic and usually difficult to mistake, given a clear pronunciation. Exceptions exist, especially in foreign borrowings. There are fewer cases of dyslexia than among speakers of languages such as English, and the concept of a spelling bee is strange to Italians.

Common variations
Some variations in the usage of the writing system may be present in practical use. These are scorned by educated people and normal written language, but they are so common in certain limited contexts that knowledge of them may be useful.
 * Usage of x instead of per "for". This is common among teenagers and in SMS abbreviations. The multiplication operator is read "per" in Italian. For example, per te ("for you") is shortened to x te (compare with English 4 u). The per within words can also be replaced with x. For example: perché ("why, because") to xché or xké; sapere ("to know") to saxe). This usage is useful shorthand in quick notes or in SMS, but it is unacceptable in formal writing.
 * Usage of foreign letters such as $\langlek\rangle$, $\langlej\rangle$ and $\langley\rangle$, especially in nicknames and SMS language: ke instead of che, Giusy instead of Giuseppina. This is mirrored in the usage of i in English names such as Staci instead of Stacey or in the usage of c in Northern Europe (Jacob instead of Jakob). The use of $\langlek\rangle$ instead of $\langlech\rangle$ or $\langlec\rangle$ to represent a plosive sound is documented in some historical texts from before the standardization of the Italian language. The usage is no longer standard in Italian. The letter $\langlek\rangle$ has sometimes been used in satire to suggest a political figure is an authoritarian or even a "pseudo-nazi". For example, Francesco Cossiga was famously nicknamed Kossiga by rioting students during his tenure as minister of internal affairs. Compare the politicized spelling Amerika in the USA. Although not a letter in the standard Italian alphabet, the letter $\langlej\rangle$ is found in many of the languages of southern Italy, including Neapolitan and Sicilian. In modern texts written in any such language, the $\langlej\rangle$ is often replaced with $\langlei\rangle$.
 * The following abbreviations are limited to electronic-communications media: nn for non "not"; cmq for comunque "anyway, however"; cm for come "how, like, as"; d for di "of"; (io/loro) sn for (io/loro) sono "I am, they are"; (io) dv for (io) devo "I must, I have to" or for dove "where"; (tu) 6 for (tu) sei "you are"; dmn for domani "tomorrow".
 * Whenever non-ASCII characters are unavailable or unreliable (as in e-mail), accents may be replaced with adjacent apostrophes. For example: in perche '  instead of perché. The practice was standard on manual typewriters that had no accents and is still common for uppercase accented letters. Uppercase $\langleÈ\rangle$ is rare and is absent from the Italian keyboard layout. It is often substituted with $\langleE ' \rangle$, even though there are several ways of producing the uppercase È on a computer.

Vowels
Italian has seven vowel phonemes:, , , , , , , represented by five letters: "a, e, i, o, u". The pairs -, and - are seldom distinguished in writing and often confused, even though most varieties of Italian employ both phonemes consistently. Compare, for example standard "perché" (why, because) and "senti"  (you hear), as pronounced by most central and southern speakers, with  and, employed by most northern speakers. As a result, the usage is strongly indicative of a person's origin. The standard (Tuscan) usage of these vowels is listed in vocabularies, and employed outside Tuscany mainly by specialists, especially actors and a few (television) journalists. These are truly different phonemes, however: compare (fishing) and  (peach), both spelled pesca. Similarly ('barrel') and  ('beatings'), both spelled botte, discriminate  and.

In general, vowel combinations usually pronounce each vowel separately. Diphthongs exist (e.g. uo, iu, ie, ai), but are limited to an unstressed u or i before or after a stressed vowel.

The unstressed u in a diphthong approximates the English semivowel w, and the unstressed i approximates the semivowel y. E.g.: buono, ieri.

Triphthongs exist in Italian as well, like "continuiamo" ("we continue"). Three vowel combinations exist only in the form semiconsonant ( or ), followed by a vowel, followed by a desinence vowel (usually ), as in miei, suoi, or two semiconsonants followed by a vowel, as the group -uia- exemplified above, or -iuo- in the word aiuola.

Mobile diphthongs
Many Latin words with a short e or o have Italian counterparts with a so-called mobile diphthong (ie and uo respectively). The mobility, however, is of stress: when the vowel sound is stressed, it is pronounced and written as a diphthong, e.g. buono 'good'; when not stressed, it is pronounced and written as a single vowel, as in bontà 'goodness'.

So Latin focus gave rise to Italian fuoco (meaning both "fire" and "optical focus"): when unstressed, as in focale ("focal") the "o" remains alone. Latin pes (more precisely its accusative form pedem) is the source of Italian piede (foot): but unstressed "e" was left unchanged in pedone (pedestrian) and pedale (pedal). From Latin jocus comes Italian giuoco ("play", "game"), though in this case gioco is more common: giocare means "to play (a game)". From Latin homo comes Italian uomo (man), but also umano (human) and ominide (hominid). From Latin ovum comes Italian uovo (egg) and ovaie (ovaries). (The same phenomenon occurs in Spanish: juego (play, game) and jugar (to play), nieve (snow) and nevar (to snow)). Stress-conditioned historical diphthongization can also produce alternating verb stems, as in stem-stressed siedo 'I sit' and suffix-stressed sediamo 'we sit'.

Consonants
Two symbols in a table cell denote the voiceless and voiced consonant, respectively.

Note: Unlike in standard English, is not a phoneme in standard Italian; instead, when preceding a velar ( or )  appears as an allophone of. More generally, nasals assimilate to the point of articulation of whatever consonant they precede. -->

Italian has geminate, or double, consonants, which are distinguished by length and intensity. Length is distinctive for all consonants except for, , , , , which are always geminate when between vowels, and , which is always single. Geminate plosives and affricates are realized as lengthened closures. Geminate fricatives, nasals, and are realized as lengthened continuants. There is only one vibrant phoneme but the actual pronunciation depends on context and regional accent. Generally one can find a flap consonant in unstressed position whereas  is more common in stressed syllables, but there may be exceptions. Especially people from the Northern part of Italy (Parma, Aosta Valley, South Tyrol) may pronounce as, , or.

Of special interest to the linguistic study of Regional Italian is the gorgia toscana, or "Tuscan Throat", the weakening or lenition of intervocalic, , and in the Tuscan language.

The voiced postalveolar fricative is present as a phoneme only in loanwords: for example, garage. Phonetic is common in Central and Southern Italy as an intervocalic allophone of : gente  'people' but la gente  'the people', ragione  'reason'.

Grammar
Italian grammar is typical of the grammar of Romance languages in general. Cases exist for personal pronouns (nominative, oblique, accusative, dative), but not for nouns.

There are two basic classes of nouns in Italian, referred to as genders, masculine and feminine. Gender may be natural (ragazzo 'boy', ragazza 'girl') or simply grammatical with no possible reference to biological gender (masculine costo 'cost', feminine costa 'coast'). Masculine nouns typically end in -o (ragazzo 'boy'), with plural marked by -i (ragazzi 'boys'), and feminine nouns typically end in -a, with plural marked by -e (ragazza 'girl', ragazze 'girls). For a group composed of boys and girls, ragazzi is the plural, suggesting that -i is a general plural. A third category of nouns is umarked for gender, ending in -e in the singular and -i in the plural: legge 'law, f. sg.', leggi 'laws, f. pl.'; fiume 'river, m. sg.', fiumi 'rivers, m. pl.', thus assignment of gender is arbitrary in terms of form, enough so that terms may be identical but of distinct genders: fine meaning 'aim, purpose' is masculine, while fine meaning 'end, ending' (e.g. of a movie) is feminine, and both are fini in the plural, a clear instance of -i as a non-gendered default plural marker. These nouns often, but not always, denote inanimates. There are a number of nouns that have a masculine singular and a feminine plural, most commonly of the pattern m. sg. -o, f. pl. -a (miglio 'mile, m. sg.', miglia 'miles, f. pl.'; paio 'pair, m. sg., paia 'pairs, f. pl.'), and thus are sometimes considered neuter (these are usually derived from neuter Latin nouns). An instance of neuter gender also exists in pronouns of the third person singular.

Examples: Nouns, adjectives, and articles inflect for gender and number (singular and plural).

Like in English, common nouns are capitalized when occurring at the beginning of a sentence. Unlike English, nouns referring to languages (e.g. Italian), speakers of languages, or inhabitants of an area (e.g. Italians) are not capitalized.

There are three types of adjectives: descriptive, invariable and form-changing. Descriptive adjectives are the most common, and their endings change to match the number and gender of the noun they modify. Invariable adjectives are adjectives whose endings do not change. The form changing adjectives "buono (good), bello (beautiful), grande (big), and santo (saint)" change in form when placed before different types of nouns. Italian has three degrees for comparison of adjectives: positive, comparative, and superlative.

The order of words in the phrase is relatively free compared to most European languages. The position of the verb in the phrase is highly mobile. Word order often has a lesser grammatical function in Italian than in English. Adjectives are sometimes placed before their noun and sometimes after. Subject nouns generally come before the verb. Italian is a null-subject language, so that nominative pronouns are usually absent, with subject indicated by verbal inflections (e.g. amo 'I love', ama 's/he loves', amano 'they love'). Noun objects normally come after the verb, as do pronoun objects after imperative verbs, infinitives and gerunds, but otherwise pronoun objects come before the verb.

There are both indefinite and definite articles in Italian. There are four indefinite articles, selected by the gender of the noun they modify and by the phonological structure of the word that immediately follows the article. Uno is masculine singular, used before z ( or ), s+consonant, gn, or ps, while masculine singular un is used before a word beginning with any other sound. The noun zio 'uncle' selects masculine singular, thus uno zio 'an uncle' or uno zio anziano 'an old uncle,' but un mio zio 'an uncle of mine'. The feminine singular indefinite articles are una, used before any consonant sound, and its abbreviated form, written un', used before vowels: una camicia 'a shirt', una camicia bianca 'a white shirt', un'altra camicia 'a different shirt'. There are seven forms for definite articles, both singular and plural. In the singular: lo, which corresponds to the uses of uno; il, which corresponds to the uses with consonant of un; la, which corresponds to the uses of una; l', used for both masculine and feminine singular before vowels. In the plural: gli is the masculine plural of lo and l ' ; i is the plural of il; and le is the plural of feminine la and l '.

There are numerous contractions of prepositions with subsequent articles. There are numerous productive suffixes for diminutive, augmentative, pejorative, attenuating etc., which are also used to create neologisms.

There are 27 pronouns, grouped in clitic and tonic pronouns. Personal pronouns are separated into three groups: subject, object (which take the place of both direct and indirect objects), and reflexive. Second person subject pronouns have both a polite and a familiar form. These two different types of address are very important in Italian social distinctions. All object pronouns have two forms: stressed and unstressed (clitics). Unstressed object pronouns are much more frequently used, and come before the verb (Lo vedo. 'I see him.'). Stressed object pronouns come after the verb, and are used when emphasis is required, for contrast, or to avoid ambiguity (Vedo lui, ma non lei. 'I see him, but not her'). Aside from personal pronouns, Italian also has demonstrative, interrogative, possessive, and relative pronouns. There are two types of demonstrative pronouns: relatively near (this) and relatively far (that). Demonstratives in Italian are repeated before each noun, unlike in English.

There are three regular sets of verbal conjugations, and various verbs are irregularly conjugated. Within each of these sets of conjugations, there are four simple (one-word) verbal conjugations by person/number in the indicative mood (present tense; past tense with imperfective aspect, past tense with perfective aspect, and future tense), two simple conjugations in the subjunctive mood (present tense and past tense), one simple conjugation in the conditional mood, and one simple conjugation in the imperative mood. Corresponding to each of the simple conjugations, there is a compound conjugation involving a simple conjugation of "to be" or "to have" followed by a past participle. "To have" is used to form compound conjugation when the verb is transitive ("Ha detto", "ha fatto": he/she has said, he/she has made/done), while "to be" is used in the case of verbs of motion and some other intransitive verbs ("È andato", "è stato": he/she has gone, he/she has been). "To be" may be used with transitive verbs, but in such a case it makes the verb passive ("Ê detto", "è fatto": it is said, it is made/done). This rule is not absolute, and some exceptions do exist.

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Note: the plural form of verbs could also be used as an extremely formal (for example to noble people in monarchies) singular form.