The term dialect can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena:
Italian is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family. Italian is the closest national language to Latin, from which it descends via vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. Taking into account both national and regional languages, it is seen that Italian and Sardinian are together the least differentiated from Latin. Italian is an official language in Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, and Vatican City. It has an official minority status in western Istria.
Occitan, also known as lenga d'òc by its native speakers, is a Romance language spoken in Southern France, Monaco, Italy's Occitan Valleys, as well as Catalonia's Val d'Aran; collectively, these regions are sometimes referred to as Occitania. It is also spoken in South Italy (Calabria) in a linguistic enclave of Cosenza area. Some include Catalan in Occitan, as the distance between this language and some Occitan dialects is similar to the distance among different Occitan dialects. Catalan was considered a dialect of Occitan until the end of the 19th century and still today remains its closest relative.
Portuguese is a Romance language originating in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. It is the sole official language of Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Brazil, while having co-official language status in East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, and Macau. A Portuguese-speaking person or nation is referred to as "Lusophone". As the result of expansion during colonial times, a cultural presence of Portuguese and Portuguese creole speakers are also found around the world. Portuguese is part of the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia and the County of Portugal, and has kept some Celtic phonology in its lexicon.
Slovene, or alternatively Slovenian, is a South Slavic language spoken by the Slovenes. It is spoken by about 2.5 million speakers worldwide, the majority of whom live in Slovenia, where it is one of the three official languages. As Slovenia is part of the European Union, Slovene is also one of its 24 official and working languages.
Ladin is a Romance language of the Rhaeto-Romance subgroup, mainly spoken in the Dolomite Mountains in Northern Italy in the provinces of South Tyrol, Trentino, and Belluno, by the Ladin people. It exhibits similarities to Swiss Romansh and Friulian.
Piedmontese is a language spoken by some 2,000,000 people mostly in Piedmont, northwestern region of Italy. Although considered by many linguists a separate language, in Italy it is often regarded as an Italian dialect. It is linguistically included in the Gallo-Italic languages group of Northern Italy, which would make it part of the wider western group of Romance languages, which also includes French, Occitan, and Catalan. It is spoken in the core of Piedmont, in northwestern Liguria, near Savona and in Lombardy.
Lombard is a language, consisting in a cluster of dialects spoken by millions of speakers in Northern Italy and Southern Switzerland, including most of Lombardy and some areas of neighbouring regions, notably the eastern side of Piedmont and the western side of Trentino, and in Switzerland in the cantons of Ticino and Graubünden. Within the Romance languages, they form part of the Gallo-Italic group.
Venetian or Venetan, is a Romance language spoken as a native language by Venetians, almost four million people in the northeast of Italy, mostly in the Veneto region of Italy, where most of the five million inhabitants can understand it, centered in and around Venice, which carries the prestige dialect. It is sometimes spoken and often well understood outside Veneto, in Trentino, Friuli, the Julian March, Istria, and some towns of Slovenia and Dalmatia (Croatia) by a surviving autochthonous Venetian population, and Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and Mexico by Venetians in the diaspora.
Maghrebi Arabic is a vernacular Arabic dialect continuum spoken in the Maghreb region, in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Western Sahara, and Mauritania. It includes Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Libyan, and Hassaniya Arabic. It is known locally as Darja, Derdja, Derja, Derija or Darija, depending on the region's dialect.. This serves to differentiate the spoken vernacular from Standard Arabic. The Maltese language is believed to be derived from Siculo-Arabic and ultimately from Tunisian Arabic, as it contains some typical Maghrebi Arabic areal characteristics.
Judeo-Italian is an endangered Jewish language, with only about 200 speakers in Italy and 250 total speakers today. The language is one of the Italian dialects. Some words have Italian prefixes and suffixes added to Hebrew words as well as Aramaic roots.
Neapolitan is a Romance language of the Italo-Dalmatian group spoken across much of Southern Italy, except for southern Calabria, southern Apulia, and Sicily, and spoken in a small part of central Italy. It is named after the Kingdom of Naples that once covered most of the area, of which the city of Naples was the capital. On October 14, 2008, a law by the Region of Campania stated that Neapolitan was to be protected.
Regional Italian is any regional variety of the Italian language.
Rioplatense Spanish, also known as Rioplatense Castilian, is a variety of Spanish spoken mainly in and around the Río de la Plata Basin of Argentina and Uruguay. It is also referred to as River Plate Spanish or Argentine Spanish. Being the most prominent dialect to employ voseo in both speech and writing, many features of Rioplatense are also shared with the varieties spoken in south and eastern Bolivia, and Paraguay. This dialect is often spoken with an intonation resembling that of the Neapolitan language of Southern Italy, but there are exceptions. The word employed to name the Spanish language in Argentina is castellano and in Uruguay, español. See names given to the Spanish language.
Tuscan is a set of Italo-Dalmatian varieties of Romance mainly spoken in Tuscany, Italy.
Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features. Dialectology treats such topics as divergence of two local dialects from a common ancestor and synchronic variation.
Roman language may refer to:
