Along with Romanian, French, Spanish and Portuguese, the Italian language descends from Latin, and can be traced back to the tenth century. However, it was only four centuries later that the Italian language was formalized and a standard language began to take shape.

In today’s time, there are about seventy million individuals that speak Italian. The vast majority of people touting the Italian language reside in Italy, Vatican, San Marino, and even Switzerland, but there are a few outlying communities popping up in Slovenia, Malta, Croatia, the United States, and even South America.

The Italian language is well known for its beautiful and diverse dialect. You might find certain linguists willing to say people in different cities of Italy speak different languages. The Tuscan dialect, together with Umbrian, Romanesco and Laziale, is the closest to standard Italian as opposed to Neapolitan and Sicilian which are almost non-mutually intelligible with Italian.

There are only 21 main letters in the Italian alphabet, with five additional letters that are exclusively used for foreign names. Most of the vocabulary for this language comes from Latin, however Italian manages to refresh simply by the borrowing of words from German, French and English. Other countries have also been known to borrow words from the Italian language, using them to describe art, music, and foods.

The main features of Italian grammar are coupled with many of the other Romance languages thanks to its deep Latin roots. In most cases, word order follows the ‘subject-verb-object’ pattern; nouns indicate gender and number; verbs agree with subjects and also indicate person and number; adjectives agree with nouns.

Learning Italian is simple if one of the Romance languages is already part of your arsenal because there are numerous likenesses. However, learning Italian seems to be most popular among the speakers of English and other Germanic languages.

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