A map showing the 'Italophone' world. Dark blue rapresents where Italian is an official or native language; green rapresents where Italian is a secondary, widely spoken or understood language, and light blue is where Italian is understood (mainly due to many of these countries being ex-Italian colonies).

Standard Italian

Italy's official language is Standard Italian, which is a descendant of the Tuscan dialect and Latin. Ethnologue has estimated that there are about 55 million speakers of the language in Italy and a further 6.7 million outside of the country. However, there are over 150 million people in the world who use Italian as a second or cultural language. In Switzerland, Italian is one of four official languages. It is also the official language of San Marino, as well as the primary language of Vatican City.

Standard Italian, adopted by the state after the unification of Italy, is based on Tuscan (in particular on the dialects of the city of Florence) and is somewhat intermediate between the Italo-Dalmatian languages of the South and the Gallo-Romance Northern Italian languages. Its development was also influenced by the other Italian dialects and by the Germanic language of the post-Roman invaders.

Italian derives diachronically from Latin and is the closest language to Latin. Unlike most other Romance languages, Italian has retained the contrast between short and long consonants which existed in Latin. As in most Romance languages, stress is distinctive. In particular, among the Romance languages, Italian is considered to be the closest to Latin in terms of vocabulary.

Italian dialects and other languages spoken

Italy has a numerous dialects, spoken all over the country, and some Italians cannot speak the standard language at all. However, the establishment of a national education system led to a decrease in variation in the languages spoken across the country. Standardization was further expanded in the 1950s and 1960s thanks to economic growth and the rise of mass media and television (the state broadcaster RAI helped set an Italian standard).

Other historic Romance languages spoken in Italy except Italian include Emiliano-Romagnolo, Friulian, Ladin, Ligurian, Lombard, Neapolitan, Piedmontese, Sardinian, Sicilian, Venetian and Romansh. These languages have given way to regional varieties of Italian. Variety is often used in idioms and folk songs.

However, there are other languages spoken in Italy, such as Albanian, Catalan, Croatian, Franco-Provençal, French, Friulian, German, Greek, Ladin, Occitan, Sardinian, and Slovene. A law passed in 1999 recognises the existence of twelve linguistic minorities which are thus officially protected.

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