| Languages of Vatican City | |
|---|---|
 Inscription in Italian over the entrance to the Vatican Museums. | |
| Official | Italian, Latin |
Vatican City uses Italian in its official documents and as its main working language. However, many other languages are also used by institutions situated within the state, such as the Holy See and the Swiss Guard, as well as personally by its diverse population.
During the Roman Empire, Latin was the language spoken in the area corresponding to the present Vatican City. The subsequent Papal States also used Latin for official purposes during the first centuries of their existence. In 1870 the area became part of the Kingdom of Italy, whose official language was Italian.
In 1929 the Lateran Treaty established Vatican City as an independent state. The Fundamental Law of Vatican City State does not establish an official language, but its laws are published in Italian in a supplement to the Acta Apostolicae Sedis (official gazette of the Holy See), which is mainly in Latin.
Since the state came into existence in 1929, most of the buildings situated within it predated it by centuries. Inscriptions can be found in them mainly in Latin, but also in Italian, Greek, French and German. [1] [ better source needed ]
Many languages are spoken within the state, as its inhabitants come from many countries. Italian is the lingua franca of the Vatican and replaced Latin as the official language of the Synod of Bishops in 2014. [2] The Holy See, the entity with authority over the state (yet legally distinct), uses Latin as its official language and Italian as its main working language in administrative and diplomatic affairs. French is also sometimes used as a diplomatic language. In the Swiss Guard, Swiss German is the language used for giving commands, but the individual guards take their oath of loyalty in their own languages: German, French, Italian or Romansh.
Since the state was established, the native languages of the popes have been Italian, German, Polish and Spanish.
The official website of Vatican City is in Italian. [3] Previous versions of the website were also available in English, French, German and Spanish. [4]
The official website of the Holy See is primarily in Italian, with versions in English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish, and partial versions in Arabic, Chinese and Latin. [5] Some content is also available in many other languages, such as Albanian, Belarusian, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, Swahili and Ukrainian. [6] [7]
The Holy See's newspaper L'Osservatore Romano is published in Italian, English, French, German, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. [8] The Vatican News website is available in many languages: Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Hindi, Hungarian, Malayalam, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Tigrinya, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. [9]
There are over 250 languages indigenous to Europe, and most belong to the Indo-European language family. Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language. The three largest phyla of the Indo-European language family in Europe are Romance, Germanic, and Slavic; they have more than 200 million speakers each, and together account for close to 90% of Europeans.
Italian is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. Italian is the least divergent Romance language from Latin, together with Sardinian. Spoken by about 85 million people including 67 million native speakers (2024), Italian is an official language in Italy, San Marino, and Switzerland, and is the primary language of Vatican City. It has official minority status in Croatia and in some areas of Slovenian Istria.
Vatican City, officially the Vatican City State, is a landlocked independent country, city-state, microstate, and enclave within Rome, Italy. It became independent from Italy in 1929 with the Lateran Treaty, and it is a distinct territory under "full ownership, exclusive dominion, and sovereign authority and jurisdiction" of the Holy See, itself a sovereign entity under international law, which maintains the city-state's temporal power and governance, diplomatic, and spiritual independence. The Vatican is also a metonym for the pope, Holy See, and Roman Curia.
An official language is a language having certain rights to be used in defined situations. These rights can be created in written form or by historic usage.
Southern Europe is the southern region of Europe. It is also known as Mediterranean Europe, as its geography is marked by the Mediterranean Sea. Definitions of southern Europe include some or all of these countries and regions: Albania, Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Gibraltar, Greece, Italy, Kosovo, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Portugal, San Marino, Serbia, Slovenia, southern France, Spain, Turkey, and Vatican City.
The European Union (EU) has 24 official languages, of which three – English, French and German – have the higher status of "procedural" languages of the European Commission. Irish previously had the lower status of "treaty language" before being upgraded to an official and working language in 2007. However, a temporary derogation was enforced until 1 January 2022. The three procedural languages are those used in the day-to-day workings of the institutions of the EU. The designation of Irish as a "treaty language" meant that only the treaties of the European Union were translated into Irish, whereas Legal Acts of the European Union adopted under the treaties did not have to be. Luxembourgish and Turkish, which have official status in Luxembourg and Cyprus, respectively, are the only two official languages of EU member states that are not official languages of the EU. In 2023, the Spanish government requested that its co-official languages Catalan, Basque, and Galician be added to the official languages of the EU.
Ecclesiastical Latin, also called Church Latin or Liturgical Latin, is a form of Latin developed to discuss Christian thought in Late antiquity and used in Christian liturgy, theology, and church administration to the present day, especially in the Catholic Church. It includes words from Vulgar Latin and Classical Latin re-purposed with Christian meaning. It is less stylized and rigid in form than Classical Latin, sharing vocabulary, forms, and syntax, while at the same time incorporating informal elements which had always been with the language but which were excluded by the literary authors of Classical Latin.
L'Osservatore Romano is the daily newspaper of Vatican City State which reports on the activities of the Holy See and events taking place in the Catholic Church and the world. It is owned by the Holy See but is not an official publication, a role reserved for the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, which acts as a government gazette. The views expressed in the Osservatore are those of individual authors unless they appear under the specific titles "Nostre Informazioni" or "Santa Sede".
A medium of instruction is a language used in teaching. It may or may not be the official language of the country or territory. If the first language of students is different from the official language, it may be used as the medium of instruction for part or all of schooling. Bilingual education or multilingual education may involve the use of more than one language of instruction. UNESCO considers that "providing education in a child's mother tongue is indeed a critical issue". In post-secondary, university and special education settings, content may often be taught in a language that is not spoken in the students' homes. This is referred to as content based learning or content and language integrated learning (CLIL). In situations where the medium of instruction of academic disciplines is English when it is not the students' first language, the phenomenon is referred to as English-medium instruction (EMI).
An endonym is a common, native name for a group of people, individual person, geographical place, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside a particular group or linguistic community to identify or designate themselves, their homeland, or their language.
A national language is a language that has some connection—de facto or de jure—with a nation. The term is applied quite differently in various contexts. One or more languages spoken as first languages in the territory of a country may be referred to informally or designated in legislation as national languages of the country. National languages are mentioned in over 150 world constitutions.
Guillemets are a pair of punctuation marks in the form of sideways double chevrons, « and », used as quotation marks in a number of languages. In some of these languages, "single" guillemets, ‹ and ›, are used for a quotation inside another quotation. Guillemets are not conventionally used in the English language.
An episcopal conference, sometimes called a conference of bishops, is an official assembly of the bishops of the Catholic Church in a given territory. Episcopal conferences have long existed as informal entities. The first assembly of bishops to meet regularly, with its own legal structure and ecclesial leadership function, is the Swiss Bishops' Conference, which was founded in 1863. More than forty episcopal conferences existed before the Second Vatican Council. Their status was confirmed by the Second Vatican Council and further defined by Pope Paul VI's 1966 motu proprio, Ecclesiae sanctae.
The Pontifical Swiss Guard is an armed force and honour guard unit maintained by the Holy See that protects the Pope and the Apostolic Palace within the territory of the Vatican City State. Established in 1506 under Pope Julius II, the Pontifical Swiss Guard is among the oldest military units in continuous operation.
This is an index of Vatican City–related topics.
The Church of San Pellegrino in Vaticano is an ancient Roman Catholic oratory in the Vatican City, located on the Via dei Pellegrini. The church is dedicated to Saint Peregrine of Auxerre, a Roman priest appointed by Pope Sixtus II who had suffered martyrdom in Gaul in the third century. It is one of the oldest churches in the Vatican City.
Women account for approximately 5.5% of the citizenry of Vatican City. According to the Herald Sun in March 2011, there were only 32 females out of 572 citizens issued with Vatican passports. One of them was a nun. In 2013, Worldcrunch reported that there were around 30 women who were citizens of Vatican City, including two South American women, two Poles, and three from Switzerland. The majority of Vatican women at the time were from Italy.
The various regional and minority languages in Europe encompass four categories:
