Italian language

The Italian (Italian (?·i) or Italian lingua) is an Romance language from the Latin spoken, especially from the archaic Tuscan variant, belonging to the italorromance family of the italic languages, members in turn the Indo-European languages. It is the official language of Italy, San Marino, Vatican City and one of the four Swiss national languages (with German, French and Romansh). It is also a co-official language, with the Croatian, in the county of Istria (Croatia), and with the Slovenian in the coastal municipalities of the Slovenian Litoral. Italian is also used, as a first or second language, by several million Italian migrants and their descendants spread throughout the world, especially in Europe. It is estimated that in 2006, some 64 million community citizens spoke Italian as a mother tongue and 14.7 million as a second or third language. Consistent number of italophones are also found in America and, to a lesser extent, in Africa and Oceania (almost the presence in Asia).

Historical, social and cultural aspects

Geographic distribution

Europe

In Italy, Italian is the mother tongue of 95% of the population residing in the country, that is, of almost all Italians and foreigners born in Italy who by law retain their nationality of origin until the fulfillment of the coming of age It is a collective of 57,700,000 speakers out of a total population of about 60 million.

Italian is the official language of Switzerland, as already indicated, along with German and French, and one of the four national languages of the Confederation (the three official ones, plus Romansh). Approximately 666,000 residents in the country (2012 census), more than 8% of citizens speak Italian or a variation of it. It is the main language in the entire Canton of Ticino, and in the Italian-speaking areas of Grisons: Mesocco, Bregaglia and Poschiavo valleys (15% of the canton's inhabitants). These areas together make up what is known as Italian Switzerland.

Italian is also the official language of San Marino and Vatican City, but it is spoken by the vast majority of its inhabitants in San Marino (25,000 Italian speakers in 2004, that is, 96% of the population of the State), in the cosmopolitan and clerical environments of the Vatican it is possible that Latin is also used, which is also the only official language of the Holy See (the laws, for example, are promulgated only in Latin), but not from Vatican City, where Italian is the language.

In Croatia 18,000 people currently (2014) speak Italian as their mother tongue and about 600,000 as a second language, or just over 13% of the Croatian population. The vast majority of Italian speakers are concentrated in the city of Fiume, in Dalmatia and in Istria. In those areas, Italian is an autochthonous language and in Istria it was spoken, as their mother tongue, by about half of the population. Following the annexation of Fiume and Istria by Yugoslavia (1947-1954), the Italian ethnic group present in the territory fell by 85% due to emigration to Italy and other Western countries. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, however, Italian once again gained importance in Croatia as a language of culture, especially in Istria County, where it became a co-official language after Croatian. In Slovenia, a very small number of Italian speakers (3,000 or 4,000 speakers) are mostly concentrated in the three coastal municipalities of Koper (Capodistria in Italian), Izola (Isola d'Istria) and Pirán (Pirano). In the latter two it is a co-official language with Slovenian, while in Capodistria Italian has co-official status only in the urban center and in districts with prominent Italian-speaking minorities.

In France, according to some estimates, there would be more than 828,000 broadcasters scattered throughout the territory of the State, probably with higher peaks, compared to the local population, in the city of Nice and on the island of Corsica, both politically and culturally tied to parts of present-day Italy for several centuries, although it can be said that a good part of the "Italian speakers" Some of these territories have only a passive knowledge of the language, due in large part to the fact that Corsica's regional language, Corsican, has many similarities with some central Italian dialects, particularly Tuscan. In Albania, despite the fact that Italian is not the country's own language and does not enjoy any level of official status, knowledge of this language is relatively widespread among the population due primarily to the Albanian diaspora in Italy and also to the influence of culture Italy and the fact that much of the coastal region is a major tourist destination frequented by Italian visitors.

As far as the rest of Europe is concerned, although Italian is not an official language in any other country, generally the most significant Italian-speaking groups are found in states that were targeted, and in some cases still are to this day today, of a consistent Italian immigration. We must point out, by importance, Germany (about 548,000 voice talent), Belgium (about 280,000 span>) and Luxembourg (main language of 2.9% of the total population of the state).

America

In America the language is or was used significantly in the United States (723 632 speakers in 2010), Canada (455 000 announcers in 2006), Brazil and Argentina. Other major groups of Italian speakers are also found in Uruguay and Venezuela (200,000 speakers), and, to a lesser extent, in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Paraguay.

In Central America the language is used mainly in southern Costa Rica, a country that received Italian immigration and where the language is spoken in municipalities such as San Vito de Java and nearby communities.

Oceania

In Oceania, only in Australia is Italian spoken as the first language by a fairly large minority that reflects the numerical importance of Italian immigration in the country between 1920-1930 and 1949-1969. According to official sources, in 2011, out of a total of 916 100 Italian-Australians (Italians born in Australia and their descendants), almost a third (295,000) continued to use Dante's language as the primary vehicle of family communication (along with English, used predominantly at work and in formal relationships).

Africa

In Africa it is used as a commercial language in Libya, Eritrea and Somalia, the former colonies of Italy. In Ethiopia its diffusion is more limited.

Asian

History

The first transregional Italian language developed in Sicily, with the Sicilian Poetic School, which flourished between about 1230 and 1270, and which had a certain influence on medieval Tuscan and in particular on one of its varieties, Archaic Florentine. The modern Italian language derives from the latter. span> began to develop its own literature, imposing itself as a written language, in the following century, in a much larger territorial area than its original area of diffusion.

The Tuscan language of Florence prevailed not for political, economic or military reasons, as is often the case, but due to the cultural prestige that came with it as the language of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, the the highest literary creation of the Middle Ages and one of the greatest universal works of all time. After the death of Dante (1321), whose philosophical and literary horizons were still within a medieval cultural framework, they wrote in Tuscan Giovanni Boccaccio and Francesco Petrarca, considered the two most important authors of Italian pre-Renaissance humanism.

At the end of the XIV century the fundamental lexicon of Italian was already 90% and from the following century a kind of common language began to form, especially in northern Italy, based on Tuscan and many Latin terms and expressions that had merged into it. This common language was used by notaries and officials as a written language in some prestigious chanceries of the time: in Mantua, Urbino, Ferrara, Venice and, from the year 1426, in the Visconti chancery in Milan.

Towards the middle of the XV century, already in the middle of the Renaissance, the first grammars in Florentine Vulgar began to be compiled, such as the Grammatica della lingua toscana by Leon Battista Alberti and, in the last decades of that same century, in the royal court of Naples, a courtly poetry in Italian flourished that had some notable representatives, such as Francesco Galeota and Pietro Jacopo De Gennaro. Always during the Renaissance, thanks also to the linguistic standardization operated by the Venetian Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), all the most important authors of the time wrote in Italian: the great Emilian poets Mateo Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto, the Lombard essayist Baldassare Castiglione, whose masterpiece, The Courtier, was translated into Spanish by Juan Boscán, the Florentine philosopher and historian Machiavelli and his fellow citizen and friend Francesco Guicciardini. In Italian (and in Latin) he also wrote the most outstanding personality of the Neapolitan letters of the Renaissance, such as Jacopo Sannazaro. From the time of Sannazaro the Neapolitans willingly accepted the supremacy of Florentine both as a written language and in forensic oratory.

In the first half of the 16th century, with the internationalization of the Renaissance, Italian literature and language began to spread, even faster than in the previous period, throughout the Western world.

At that time the Italian language (the name Italian had come to prevail, during the middle decades of that same century, over any other) had ceased to be fully identified with vulgar Florentine and Thanks to the high level of its literature, it had established itself as one of the great languages of culture in Europe at the time. In the second half of the century XVI, already in Mannerist age, Torquato Tasso, born in Sorrento, prevailed as the greatest Italian author of his time. At the time of Tasso and the Counter-Reformation, the comedy of art developed, a popular theatrical genre in which dialectal forms and lexicons merge with Italian. This form of performance was widely accepted internationally, as was theater in music, or melodrama, born in Florence in the last two decades of the century XVI, with poetic texts of a historical or mythological nature and written in courtly Italian, which in the following centuries was successfully exported to the rest of Europe and America.

In 1585, a private academy, the Accademia della Crusca, was officially established in Florence to maintain the purity of the Italian language and to codify its grammar and syntax. In 1612 the Academy published in Venice the first Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, which, together with the Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language (1611) by Sebastián de Covarrubias, served model to other dictionaries compiled successively in France, England and Germany.

In the Baroque era, breaking the monopoly held by Latin in the scientific and philosophical field, the first essays related to these disciplines began to be published in Italian, among which Dialogues on the two maximum systems stands out due to their importance of the world of Galileo Galilei. Also in the Baroque age, during the Spanish domination, in Naples, the main peninsular urban center and capital of a Kingdom that included a third of Italy at the time, written Italian was already more widespread than Latin, still the language of scientific education in the city and in its State: out of a total Of 2,800 books kept in the main library of Naples and published in the XVII century, 1,500 were written in Italian (53.6 % of the total) compared to 1,086 written in Latin (28.8% of the total) and only 26 in Neapolitan (0.9% of the total).

In the 18th century, some Italian states, such as the Kingdom of Sardinia and the duchies of Parma and Modena, they took several measures, at the legislative level, to definitively replace Latin with Italian also in university instruction (a sector of higher education where, until then, Latin continued to prevail). After the adoption of these measures, in Piedmont (where the language of Dante, as in most of the other pre-unitarian Italian states, was already official in the public administration from the year 1561), the use of Italian, as well as in the duchies of Parma and Modena, was it also made it compulsory in university education. In Sardinia, where a language closely related to Tuscan and Corsican (Gallures) was already spoken in the north of the island, Italian was imposed as the only official language (1759- 1760). In 1754, at the University of Naples, the Campan philosopher and economist, Antonio Genovesi, one of the greatest Italian intellectuals of the time, took the initiative to give university classes in vulgar, abandoning the use of Latin and causing an enormous scandal in the academic environment of the city.

When the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed (1861) Italian was already the hegemonic language of literature and the official language in written communication and administration, but only a small minority spoke it, that is, only the educated part of the population. We do not have statistics available on this, but according to Tullio De Mauro, one of the greatest contemporary Italian linguists, at the time of unification, 2.5% of the population was Italian-speaking, that is, all literate Tuscans and Romans and all others. Italians who had completed high school (from 11 to 18 years of age) and university studies. According to another linguist, Arrigo Castellani, the number of Italian speakers at that time could reach approximately 9% of the population. Both data denote a anomalous situation determined by a series of causes, among which stand out: the political fragmentation of Italy between the 6th and 19th centuries; the high rate of illiteracy; the prolonged use of Latin (along with or without Italian) as the language of higher and university education in several of the pre-unitary Italian states, up to at least the Napoleonic age; and the vitality of so many local Italo-Romance language varieties spoken but almost never used in their written form by their speakers. It should be noted, however, that these language varieties, improperly called "dialects", were and are, for the most part, autochthonous and regional Neo-Latin languages (Gallo-Italic, Central-South Italo-Romance, Retorro-Roman, etc.), commonly known as dialects for the simple fact of not being standardized.

Speakers of foreign linguistic minorities (that is, speakers of languages not belonging to the Italian Neo-Latin context, such as the Arbëreshë, the Grikos, the South Tyroleans and the Franco-Provençals) have always represented a small part of the population native Italian (between 1% and 2.1%).

From the Unification of Italy and throughout the XIX century, the acceleration of the rate of industrialization, the greater Primary school attendance rate, emigration to the cities and the expansion of the means of communication (roads, railways, etc.), contributed to a decrease in the use of regional varieties and a growing familiarity with the national language. However, at the beginning of the XX century, the use of standard Italian was not yet, in several regions, a satisfactory diffusion. In the central decades of the same century the situation changed radically. In 1951 only 13% of the Italian population used exclusively one "dialect" compared to 18.5% who spoke only Italian and more than two-thirds who used both "dialect" such as Italian. In the second half of the XX century, with the progressive disappearance of illiteracy, the widespread dissemination of the press, television (operating since 1954) and, more recently, information technology, a linguistic homogenization that was difficult to foresee at the time of the constitution of the national State has been witnessed. In a 2006 report published by the European Commission, which we have already mentioned above, Italian was found to be the mother tongue of 95% of the population residing in Italy (with the inclusion, therefore, of registered foreigners).

Official recognition

Italy

As already noted, Italian was, from the XIV century, the only autochthonous language with national and international and, before the process of the Risorgimento, the only language of compulsory education in all the pre-unitary States (together with Latin in the States of the Church and in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies) and, with few exceptions, the only administrative and literary language in general use. Italian has also been spoken for centuries by the bourgeoisie and the educated classes of the pre-unit states. Therefore, it was not deemed necessary to proclaim it the official language of the Kingdom of Italy, nor in the Albertino Statute (promulgated in 1848 in the Kingdom of Italy). Sardinia and adopted, after the reunification of Italy, throughout the country), nor in the new Italian Republican Constitution of 1948, currently in force. In the Albertino Statute, Italian was declared the language of communication of the Sardinian Parliament (with the possibility, on the part of the representatives of the Occitan and Franco-Provençal minorities, of being able to express themselves in French), since it already had official status in Piedmont since the year 1561 and in Sardinia since the year 1759. In the Constitution of 1948, there is no mention of Italian as an official language, taking for granted its function as a national language that is evident in the legislative, legal activity and in a linguistic policy that Until the Second World War it was markedly centralist. Express recognition is found, curiously, in some international treaties and in the statute of the Trentino-Alto Adige region, which is formally a constitutional law of the Italian State: «...[the] Italian language...is the official language of the State» (in it.:...[La lingua] italiana...è la lingua ufficiale dello Stato), and it is indirectly deduced from the same republican Constitution that expresses it, in art. 6, in this way: «...the Italian Republic will protect, by means of appropriate rules, linguistic minorities...» (ie minorities, compared to a majority of Italian speakers). In other European (United Kingdom, Sweden, etc.) and American (United States, among others) countries, which do not have an official language explicitly indicated in their respective Constitutions, a situation similar to that of Italy occurs: the official status of their national languages is reflected in their ordinary legislation and because of their importance as a hegemonic means of communication in all spheres, public and private, and as a sign of identity of a State or specific ethnic groups.

Switzerland

In Switzerland, Italian is the official and national language of the Confederation, along with German and French (Romansh is the national and cantonal language). Its status is contemplated in article 70 of the Swiss Federal Constitution of 1999. At the cantonal level, Italian is the only official language of the Canton of Ticino (83% Italian-speaking) and one of the three official languages of Grisons (jointly with German and Romansh). In Italian Switzerland (which includes the Canton of Ticino and part of Grisons) they also speak, especially in rural areas and in informal settings, Lombard-type Gallo-Italic dialects that have no official recognition.

Vatican City and San Marino

Italian is the official language of Vatican City (State located in the heart of the city of Rome), according to paragraph 2 of the "Law on the sources of law" (in it.: Legge sulle fonti del diritto) of June 7, 1929, which is part of the "Supplement on the performance of the laws and regulations of the Vatican City State&# 3. 4; (in it.:Supplemento per le leggi e disposizioni dello Stato della Città del Vaticano) attached to the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, for the performance of the Lateran Pacts of February 11, 1929. The Holy See, the body of international law that retains the sovereignty of the State, instead recognizes Latin as its only official language. Italian also has official language status in the Most Serene Republic of San Marino, which, like Vatican City, is an independent enclave within the Italian national territory.

Slovenia (Slovenian Coast)

In the Slovenian cities of Koper (in it.: Capodistria), Izola (in it.: Isola d'Istria), Piran (in it.: Pirano) and Ankaran (in it.: Ancarano), the Italian is an official language together with Slovenian. The bilingualism of these cities, all belonging to the Slovenian coast, is guaranteed by art. 11 of the Constitution of Slovenia of 1991 and by the relative rules of action. The Italian-speaking minority also has, always by constitutional law, the status of autochthonous national minority (art. 5 and 64 of the Constitution) and the right to occupy one of the two seats in the Slovenian National Assembly (Državni zbor), reserved for minority historical communities (the other is reserved for a representative of the Hungarian community).

Croatia (Istria and Fiume)

In Croatia as well, as in Slovenia, Italian has the status of autochthonous language and, as a hallmark of a national historical minority, receives, along with Serbian, Ruthenian, Hungarian and other spoken languages since the Middle Ages on Croatian territory, a particular legal guardianship. This guardianship is guaranteed by constitutional law no. 155 of December 23, 2002, subsequently modified by constitutional deliberation and decree no. 47 of April 19, 2010 and by constitutional deliberations n. 80 of June 28, 2010 and n. 93 of August 10, 2011. Croatian legislation provides, among other measures, for the right of national minorities to choose between a minimum of five and a maximum of eight deputies to represent them in the State Parliament (in cr.:duma), leaving local governments the task of ensuring and promoting the social and cultural development of the communities present in the various counties of the country. Acting therefore within the Croatian constitutional framework, the Istrian Regional Assembly, the supreme body of the County of Istria, took a historic decision in 2009, proclaiming in its statute (art. 21 et seq.) Croatian-Italian bilingualism in the entire territory of its jurisdiction (2822 km² and 208 440 inhab. in 2011).

In Fiume, in Croatian Rijeka, the third largest inhabited center in Croatia with a population of 128,000 residents (2011), the Italian language and culture they receive a particular guardianship by the City Statute, approved by the Municipal Council on March 27, 2006 (art. 14). Fiume is the only city located outside the Istrian region where the Italian language has been able to maintain a certain vitality, not so much because of the limited number of Italophones residing in the municipal area (2,276 speakers in 2011, or 1.8% of the urban population), as for the presence of a large Italian Community (IC) made up of 7,360 registered (mostly Croatian-speaking) which, together with all the Italian communities in Croatia, forms the Italian National Community (CNI), the which is also headquartered in Fiume and reports to the Italian Union (UI) which brings together all Italians from Croatia and Slovenia (34,365 registered in Croatia and 3,294 in Slovenia). The Italian Union has two headquarters: the main one is in Fiume, the other, open as a prominent headquarters, is in Capodistria (in cr. Koper), in Slovenia. The Italian Union is a subject of public law, recognized as such by Italy, Croatia and Slovenia.

The presence in the urban area of four Italian primary schools (in Croatia primary schools last 8 years) and one higher school, all of them officially recognized either by the Italian Ministry of Education or by its counterpart of Croatia, reinforces the role played by the three Italian institutions present in the city. In these schools the lessons are taught in Italian and with Italian texts (only the compulsory study of the Croatian language is taught in this language). In Fiume there is a publishing house (EDIT) that has published a daily since 1946, La voce del popolo, a biweekly current affairs magazine, Panorama (since 1952), a monthly, Arcobaleno (since 1948, dedicated to schools and students), and a literary magazine, la Battana (since 1964), all in Italian, and textbooks for high schools of teaching, whether in Italian or Croatian.

Dialectology

Varieties of italorromances, galoitálica and Sardinian languages.

Percentage of people using the regional language in the family context in 1980 by region.

Language map of Italy and Corsica.

Colloquial Italian is de facto a language quite fragmented into «dialects», although linguistically it is arguable that they are sister languages of Italian that in the last century and a half have been getting closer to the standard form.

Italian is based on archaic Tuscan and, like the other Italian-Romance languages, comes from Latin. Some central Italian varieties (such as Romanesco and the other central Italian-Romance varieties) are more or less close to standard Italian, however the northern Italian varieties and those in the southern half of the country are more divergent, and show more the influence of regional Italian languages:

• In northern Italy, Galloitálic languages (piamontés, emiliano-romañolo, lombardo—oriental and western) and ligur are spoken; Italian variants influenced by these languages have always been developed in the north, but, in spite of that, in everyday use they are more similar to standard Italian. The vereto is the most divergent "galoitálica" language of the others and more similar to the standard Italian, so some authors classify it outside the Galician group and, in its domain, it has a strong colloquial diffusion.

• In the south there are different indigenous varieties of the Tuscan, belonging to three main Italian groups: Neapolitan, Sicilian and Romanesque (or central Italian). Due to the wide use of regional languages and the slightest penetration of the standard Italian in the south of Calabria and in the interior of Sicily, the colloquial language of the southernmost peninsular and the islands is largely removed from the standard Italian. The local varieties were used, in a colloquial and informal manner, in the ancient kingdoms of Naples and Sicily: the various forms of Neapolitan (in their many regional variants, known as abruzzese and molisano in Abruzos and Molpoliise; bars and foggiano in the northern and central part of Apulia; Lucan in Basilicata and cosentinoos in the north of Calabria; italoromanzo sure intermediate, they are closer to the standard Italian, while the local varieties of Sicilian (such as the brothel in the south of Apulia; the crotonese, catanzarese and reggino in the center and south of Calabria; and the different dialects of the Sicilian spoken on the island of Sicily and in its smaller archipelagos), known, together, as italoromanzo sure estremoThey are more divergent than the previous ones.

• In Sardinia we speak, together with the Italian, the Sardinia, recognized by the State co-official language throughout the island. Sardo is an insular romance language, with many local varieties (or dialects), and is spoken preferably in a family environment by 45% of the regional population, compared to 55% of the announcers who express themselves prevalently in Italian. In addition to the sardo itself, in Sardinia we also speak gallurés and sassars, which are recognized as transition languages between the sardo and the italorromance languages such as the corso, being the sassars closest to the sardo and more influenced by this respect of the gallurés.

• The re-Romantic languages, integrated in the Italian case, by the Friulan (speaking in much of the region of Friul-Venice Julia) and the Ladino (speaking in specific areas of the Trentino-Alto Adigio regions and the northern end of Veneto), are both located in the north-east of Italy.

Linguistic description

Classification

Italian is an Indo-European language of the Romance subfamily, specifically a language of the Italo-Romance group, so the closest languages to it are Corsican, Romanesque, Sicilian and Neapolitan.

The Romance group of Italian is somewhat difficult to classify into a specific Romance linguistic branch and seems to be transitional between Western Romance and Eastern Romance, although Italo-Romance shares 13 isoglosses with strict Eastern Romance or Balcorromance (Balco-Romanian and Dalmatian) and 3 with Western Romance (Ibero-Romance, Gallo-Romance, Occitan-Romance, Retorromance, Gallo-Italic and Insular Romance), which makes it possible to group it into Eastern Romance. This classification is the most plausible, although the processes of evolutionary development of the Romance languages are still the subject of research. On the other hand, Ethnologue presents a controversial scheme that includes the Italo-Romance languages with Western romances, but said classification excludes Corsican from Italo-Romance, grouping it with Insular Romance and includes in this group the Dalmatian and Istrian, a group called Italo-Dalmatian, however said classification is not phylogenetic because Corsican descends from Tuscan and therefore It is both the sister language of Italian, Dalmatian shares unique isoglosses with Balco-Romanian and none with Italo-Romance, which is why they are not related, Istrian due to its isoglosses is closely related to Venetian, which is why it would form part of the Gallo-Italic languages and Western romances at the same time.

Typologically, Italian is a fusional inflectional language, with a head initial and complement marking, and the basic order is SVO (declarative sentences without topicalization).

Phonology

The Italian consonant inventory is given by:

Italian has a typically Romance system consisting of seven vowels with four degrees of overture, made up of /a, ɛ, e, i, ɔ, o, u/, in addition to its 24 consonantal phonemes, the phonetic sound [ŋ] is formed by placing the consonant "n" followed by a velar consonant, this phenomenon also occurs in the Spanish language in words such as "manco", "tengo", "zanja". Compared to other Romance languages, Italian is highly conservative in phonology.

Spelling

Italian has a fairly regular orthography, with each letter or digraph having a fixed pronunciation, with predictable exceptions. It is characterized by the conservation of the final vowels, and by the pronunciation of the geminate consonants (double consonants). The tonic stress is normally found on the penultimate syllable, but it can also be on the last or the penultimate syllable.

Some pronunciation rules can, however, confuse Spanish-speakers. For example, c followed by e or i is pronounced “ch” (IPA /tʃ/), while before a, o and u It is pronounced /k/. To keep the sound /k/ before e or i, an h must be added: chiamo is pronounced «quiamo» (IPA /'kja.mo/). To obtain the “ch” sound, add an i before the other vowels: ciao is pronounced "chao" /'tʃao/ (the i is not pronounced).

Similarly, before e or i, the g is pronounced IPA /ʤ/. It will be pronounced /g/ (as in gato) before the other vowels. The h and i are also used to modify their pronunciation.

Double consonants differ from single consonants in pronunciation. An analogy with Spanish is the n of «innoble».

Grammar

Italian grammar presents numerous similarities with Catalan, French, Galician, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian with which it shares membership in the Romance language family.

Nouns

Nouns have two genders: masculine and feminine, as well as two numbers: singular and plural. The main endings, by gender and number, are:

• male in -or, plural in -i: libror, libri
• male or female in -e, plural in -i: fiore, fiori; luce, luci
• male in -a, plural in -i: poeta, poeti
• female in -a, plural in -e: scala, scale

Invariable in Italian are the nouns that end in a stressed vowel (la virtù / le virtù – la virtú / las virtudes), the nouns (almost all of foreign origin) that end in a consonant (il bar / i bar – the bar / the bars), nouns ending in unstressed -i (il bikini / i bikini, la crisis / le crisi – the bikini / the bikinis, the crisis / the crises), and many other nouns.

Nouns ending in -a are usually feminine, while those ending in -o are usually masculine, and those ending in -e can be masculine or feminine. The plural is formed in -e when the word ends in -a or in -i when the word ends in -o or -e. On the other hand, there are many exceptions that derive from Latin terms, for example: la mano and its plural le mani, both feminine.

There is a fairly large group of words, mostly referring to parts of the human body, which in the singular end in -o and are masculine, while in the plural they end in -a and become feminine, for example: il braccio / le braccia (the arm / arms) or l'uovo / le uova (the egg / the eggs). Originally these words had a neuter gender in Latin, brachium / brachia and ovum / ova.

Articles

Articles in Italian are of two types: indeterminate and determinate. The former serve to indicate a generic element of a whole, while the latter, to indicate a specific element of a whole.

Indefinite articles:

• singular male: One, One (before words that begin with z, gn, x, pn, ps or s impure, that is to say s followed by a consonant)
• female singular: One, a' (before words that begin with vowel)

There is no single true plural form; To do this, use can be made of the masculine partitative article (dei; degli, before words that begin with z, gn, x, pn, ps, or impure s) or feminine (delle).

Definite articles:

• singular male: il, I do. (before words that begin with z, gn, x, pn, psor s impure; contracted l'm to words that begin with vowel)
• female singular: the (against on l'm to words that begin with vowel)
• plural male: i, gli (before words that begin with z, x, gn, pn, ps, s impure or vocal)
• plural female: him

The contraction of gli before words beginning with i, and of le before words beginning with e > («gl'individui», «l'erbe») is already considered archaic. In bureaucratic and legal language there is a tendency not to contract la before a vowel: «la espressione».

Note: the choice of the article is made on the basis of the word that follows, even if this is not a noun, but part of the speech.

Some examples:

The different forms of the definite article correspond to as many variants of the demonstrative adjective quello: quello specchio, quel comportamento, etc.

Personal pronouns

Personal subject pronouns are understood, unless you want to insist on the person performing the action.

	Singular	Plural
1a person	io - Me.	No - us.
2a (informal)	You - You.	voi - you, you.
2a person (courtesy, used with verb in third person singular and plural respectively) 2a person (courtesy, regional or literary, used with verb in second plural person)	Lei - you Voi - you	Loro - you (very formal)
3a (literary or outdated)	egli - he (animate) That's it. - he (inanimated) She - she (animated) Essa - she (inanimate)	Yes. - they (inanimated) That's it. - they (inanimated)
3a (usual)	lui - He did. lei - She is.	Loro - they

Verbs

Verbs can be conjugated in the indicative, subjunctive, conditional and imperative. There are also three impersonal forms: infinitive, gerund, and participle.

Verbs are divided into three categories or conjugations: -are verbs, -ere verbs, and -ire verbs. >. Some verbs, such as essere (to be), are irregular.

Along with the traditional conjugation categories, categories have also been introduced that include verbs such as avviare, which are quite frequent and have different endings and accents.

In the «passato prossimo» (perfect tense) both the verb essere (to be) and the verb avere (to have) are used depending on the type of verb they accompany (of movement, state, reflexive...), as in French (être, avoir) or in German (sein, have). If the verb essere is used, the participle is appropriate in gender and number.

The «present indicative» of essere (to be, to be) and avere (to have, to have) is:

Evolutionary Traits of Italian

• Assimilation of consonant groups ct and ptLatin, they pass the double consonant tt. Examples: Latin acceptāre 'acceptar' أن accettare (although there is some exception as praticare and its derivatives), and lat. oct 'ocho'  it. otto. The result for -ct- contrasts with the western Romanesque languages, including the Galician languages of northern Italy, which in that position present palatalization.
• Palatalization of l in consonant groups pl, bl and cl, gl of Latin, by piss /pj/, bi /bj/ and ♪ /kj/, ghi /gj/. Examples: piano "Land/plane" (from Latin planus), più "more" (from Latin plus), Chiesa 'iglesia' (from Latin ecclesia)
• Loss of the s Latin end. Examples: Gesù "Jesus" (from Latin Iesus), Giovanni John. Iohannes).
• Loss of the i of the Latin final diptongos. Examples: water (from Latin) imperium), It's like (from Latin) Esentia)

Writing system

Italian uses 21 letters of the Latin alphabet. Indeed, the letters «k», «j», «w», «x» and «y» are only used in words of foreign origin or graphic variants of writing, which are increasingly used in written communication on the Internet. and instant messages on mobile phones. Like French, Italian uses the consonant cluster gn, to represent the Spanish ñ sound. It uses the letter group gli to make a sound similar to Portuguese lh, or Spanish ll. In the case of the letter h, very few Italian words have it in isolation, including the present tense forms of the verb avere (to have). It usually appears in the groups ch and gh, equivalent in Spanish to qu and gu followed by e or i, respectively. Similarly, c and g are combined with i before a, o, and u, to get the same sound as c and g before e and i, in which case the i is silent and only modifies the sound of the letter it follows.

In Italian, like French, there are many contractions, which are indicated by an apostrophe ('). Example: L'ora, instead of La ora.

Italian uses three accents in its writing: the grave accent (`), above a, e, i, o, u (à, è, ì, ò, ù), the acute accent (´) only above e (é) in words such as perché ("why", "because") and other conjunctions composed of prepositions, adverbs and the ché ("what"), the which always fall on the last syllable and the circumflex accent (^) only above i to represent the contraction of a double i at the end of some words (principio>principii>principî). Perhaps (very rarely) it is used to distinguish similar words ("volta" time, "vôlta" the shape of the arc). In poetry it indicates a contraction and can be found in countless words.