Interesting Facts About Italian Languages and Dialects

The Italian language is spoken by some 94% of the population. After 1945, when the northeastern border areas that had been annexed to Italy after World War I reverted to Yugoslavia, ethnic minorities accounted for less than 5% of the total population. Of these traditional linguistic minorities, half were members of German-speaking communities concentrated in the Alto Adige (South Tyrol) and northeastern frontier, a quarter were members of French-speaking communities in Aosta and other northwestern valleys, and the remaining quarter were mostly Albanians and Greeks scattered through the southern provinces. A very small number of Slovene-speaking people continued to live in the northeastern Friuli-Venezia Giulia region. Over the 1990s, however, immigration—legal and illegal—increased dramatically, much of it from Africa and Asia. Italy's linguistic demography diversified accordingly.
 
Italian belongs to the Romance group of the Indo-European languages. Based chiefly on the Tuscan dialect, Italian emerged as a literary language during the 14th century in the writings of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Since then it has changed less than has English in the same period. Centuries passed, however, before this literary language displaced the local dialects in many regions.
 
Regional dialects differ considerably from literary Italian, both in accent and in the local use of certain words and expressions. Most of the northwestern dialects tend to be strongly influenced by French, while in the northeast the Venetian dialect shows Slavic and Illyrian influences. In central Italy, Tuscan and Umbro-Latian dialects predominate, while in the south the major dialects are Neapolitan and Sicilian. Sardinia's dialect is so different that some experts regard it as a separate language. For many centuries it was virtually impossible for a resident of the south to understand the speech of a northerner if neither employed standard Italian, but this situation changed markedly in the decades after World War II. Because of expanded opportunities for education and travel, as well as exposure to newspapers, motion pictures, radio, and television, the use of standard Italian rapidly became the norm.

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