Learn Another Language : Characteristics Of The Italian Language
The Italian language has been dated back to the end of tenth century and shares characteristics with Romanian, Spanish, French and Portuguese. However, it took around another four hundred years for Italian to become an official language.
In today’s time, there are about seventy million individuals that speak Italian. Most of them live in Italy, San Marino, Vatican and Switzerland but there is also a numerous community of speakers of Italian in the United States of America and South America, Croatia, Malta and Slovenia.
There is a distinct vibrancy to the numerous Italian dialects. You might find certain linguists willing to say people in different cities of Italy speak different languages. Infact, the Neapolitan and Sicilian languages are nearly indiscernible as an Italian language, while the Tuscan, Romanesco, Umbrian, and Laziale dialects hold true to what is believed to be the Italian standard.
The Italian alphabet, like the American, contains twenty six letters, however only twenty one are considered true Italian, while the remaining five are reserved only for foreign names. Much of the vocabulary of this language is derived from Latin but Italian manages to stay fresh by borrowing words from English, French, and German. Many Italian words have also become part of foreign vocabularies, mainly names of foods, musical terms and art related words.
The Italian grammar has a Latin base, so therefore its main features are shared with other Romance languages. As with these languages, word order most often follows the order Subject-Verb-Object and so on with nouns determined by gender and number, finding agreement with adjectives, while verbs agree with their subjects and are placed based on person and number.
Learning Italian is simple if one of the Romance languages is already part of your arsenal because there are numerous likenesses. Interestingly, a pattern has emerged of natives of English and Germanic languages attempting to pick up Italian.
Now Try : Italian Phrases