Italian Langauge Facts

Italian is one of the Romance languages, and has remained closer to the original Latin than any of the others. As the transmitter of the great culture of the Renaissance, its influence on the other languages of Western Europe has been profound. Being the official language of Italy, San Marino, and one of the official languages of Switzerland and the Holy See (Vatican City), Italian is also widely spoken in the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, France, Monaco (Principality of), Slovenia, and Somalia. All told there are about 60 million speakers of Italian.

The Italian dialects, vary tremendously, often to the point where communication becomes a problem. The literary standard came into being in the 14th century and modern literary Italian is essentially Tuscan. Since 1870 the dialect of Rome has gained considerable prestige but it has still failed to eclipse the Florentine standard. The Italian alphabet consists basically of 21 letters- j, k, w, x, and y appear only in foreign words. The stress in Italian generally falls on the next to last or third from last syllable.

The only written accent is the grave, which is used when-ever a word of more than one syllable stresses the final vowel (città-city). It is also used on words of a single syllable to distinguish between two words that would otherwise have the same spelling, as for example e, meaning "and," but è, meaning "is."