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.
Maltese is a Semitic language derived from late medieval Sicilian Arabic with Romance superstrata spoken by the Maltese people. It is the national language of Malta and the only official Semitic and Afroasiatic language of the European Union. Maltese is a Latinized variety of spoken historical Arabic through its descent from Siculo-Arabic, which developed as a Maghrebi Arabic dialect in the Emirate of Sicily between 831 and 1091. As a result of the Norman invasion of Malta and the subsequent re-Christianization of the islands, Maltese evolved independently of Classical Arabic in a gradual process of latinization. It is therefore exceptional as a variety of historical Arabic that has no diglossic relationship with Classical or Modern Standard Arabic. Maltese is thus classified separately from the 30 varieties constituting the modern Arabic macrolanguage. Maltese is also distinguished from Arabic and other Semitic languages since its morphology has been deeply influenced by Romance languages, namely Italian and Sicilian.
The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family.
Vulgar Latin, also known as Popular or Colloquial Latin, is the range of non-formal registers of Latin spoken from the Late Roman Republic onward. Vulgar Latin as a term is both controversial and imprecise. Spoken Latin existed for a long time and in many places. Scholars have differed in opinion as to the extent of the differences, and whether Vulgar Latin was in some sense a different language. This was developed as a theory in the nineteenth century by Raynouard. At its extreme, the theory suggested that the written register formed an elite language distinct from common speech, but this is now rejected.
Vernacular is the ordinary, informal, spoken form of language, particularly when perceived as being of lower social status in contrast to standard language, which is more codified, institutional, literary, or formal. More narrowly, a particular variety of a language that meets the lower-status perception, and sometimes even carries social stigma, is also called a vernacular, vernacular dialect, nonstandard dialect, etc. and is typically its speakers' native variety. Despite any such stigma, modern linguistics regards all nonstandard dialects as grammatically full-fledged varieties of a language.
Medieval Latin was the form of Literary Latin used in Roman Catholic Western Europe during the Middle Ages. In this region it served as the primary written language, though local languages were also written to varying degrees. Latin functioned as the main medium of scholarly exchange, as the liturgical language of the Church, and as the working language of science, literature, law, and administration.
Italian grammar is the body of rules describing the properties of the Italian language. Italian words can be divided into the following lexical categories: articles, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections.
Regional Italian is any regional variety of the Italian language.
Terrone is an epithet of the Italian language with which the inhabitants of Northern Italy depreciatively or jokingly indicate the inhabitants of Southern Italy. Southern Italians, in turn, call Italians from the northern regions polentoni.
The Sicilian School was a small community of Sicilian and mainland Italian poets gathered around Frederick II, most of them belonging to his imperial court in Palermo. Headed by Giacomo da Lentini, they produced more than 300 poems of courtly love between 1230 and 1266, the experiment being continued after Frederick's death by his son, Manfred.
The Verona Orational, also known as the Libellus Orationum, is a late 7th or early 8th century Visigothic prayer book. It is the only liturgical book that was written before the Moorish invasion and is the only surviving Visigothic manuscript containing figural decoration. The manuscript has 127 folios that measure 330 mm by 260 mm. The text was written in Visigothic minuscule. A marginal gloss indicated that the manuscript was produced in Tarragona, at the church of Saint Fructuosus.
The Mediterranean Lingua Franca, or Sabir, was a contact language, or languages, that were used as a lingua franca in the Mediterranean Basin from the 11th to the 19th centuries. April McMahon describes Sabir as a "fifteenth century proto-pidgin" and "a relic of the original Lingua Franca, a medieval language used by Mediterranean traders and by the Crusaders." Operstein and McMahon categorize Sabir and "Lingua Franca" as separate but related languages.
Venetian literature is the corpus of literature in Venetian, the vernacular language of the region roughly corresponding to Venice, from the 12th century. Venetian literature, after an initial period of splendour in the sixteenth century with the success of artists such as Ruzante, reached its zenith in the eighteenth century, thanks to its greatest exponent, dramatist Carlo Goldoni. Subsequently, the literary production in Venetian underwent a period of decline following the collapse of the Republic of Venice, but survived nonetheless into the twentieth century to reach peaks with wonderful lyrical poets such as Biagio Marin of Grado.
Romagnol is a Romance language spoken in the historical region of Romagna, consisting mainly of the southeastern part of Emilia-Romagna, Italy. The name is derived from the Lombard name for the region, Romagna. Romagnol is also spoken outside the region, particularly in the independent Republic of San Marino. Romagnol is classified as endangered because older generations have "neglected to pass on the dialect as a native tongue to the next generation".
The Ritmo di Sant'Alessio or Ritmo marchigiano su Sant'Alessio is a late twelfth-century metrical vita of the legendary saint Alexius of Rome composed for public performance by an anonymous giullare. It is one of the earliest pieces of Italian literature.
Floris Italicae linguae libri novem is a book written by Florentine scholar and cleric Agnolo Monosini (1568–1626), who played a key role in the development of the Italian language two hundred years prior to the Risorgimento. The book was published in 1604, as a collection of many vernacular Italian proverbs and idioms, comparing and contrasting them with Greek and Latin.
The Placiti Cassinesi are four official juridical documents written between 960 and 963 in southern Italy, regarding a dispute on several lands among three Benedictine monasteries and a local landowner. They are considered the first extant documents written in a Romance vernacular of Italy, along with the Veronese Riddle and the Commodilla catacomb inscription.
The Commodilla catacomb inscription is found on the cornice of a fresco in the tomb of the Christian martyrs Felix and Adauctus, located in the catacombs of Commodilla in Rome. The graffito has an important place in the history of Italian, as it represents a form of language intermediate between Latin and Old Italian.
The Saint Clement and Sisinnius inscription, written around the end of the eleventh century, is located in the subterranean chapel of the Basilica of San Clemente al Laterano in Rome. It is the very first example of the Italian language used in a work of art.
The Arianese dialect, typical of the territorial area of Ariano Irpino, is a vernacular variety of the Irpinian dialect, belonging in turn to the Neapolitan group of southern Italian dialects. Like all Romance languages, it descends directly from Vulgar Latin, a language of Indo-European stock that has been widespread in the area since Roman times.
