History of the Italian Language

Like all Romance languages, Italian traces its origins back to the popular form of Latin, known as Vulgar Latin, spoken by the common people of the Roman Empire. In fact, Italian retains more of the Latin vocabulary than any other Romance language. Today, Italian has around 63 million speakers both in Italy and worldwide and is an official language of Italy, San Marino, the Vatican, Switzerland, and the European Union among many other places where Italians and Italian speakers can be found.

It is impossible to say with precision exactly when the people of the Italian peninsula stopped speaking Latin and began to speak Italian since the transition was both gradual and smooth, with the older language evolving bit by bit into the more modern. The oldest texts recognized as “Italian” (as opposed to Vulgar Latin) date back to AD 960-963, though the vernacular tongue used then was not the same as today’s Italian. That language is based on the dialect that developed around Florence in the Middle Ages and takes its written form from the medieval Italian of Dante, the poet of the Divine Comedy, whose prestige helped make Tuscan (Florentine) Italian the language of the arts and thus by default Standard Italian. There were (and are), however, dozens of other dialects, all of which were on roughly equal footing prior to the unification movement of the nineteenth century.

Just prior to the 1861 unification of Italy, the Risorgimento (Rebirth), Alessandro Manzoni published The Betrothed (1840), the first modern Italian-language novel. He, too, adopted the Tuscan-Florentine version of Italian and helped to popularize it as the standard form of the language for use in culture, education, and government during and after unification.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Italian immigrants carried the language to the United States, Canada, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Australia. Italy’s colonial ambitions spread the language in Libya, Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, all of which continue to have some Italian speakers even today. In Argentina, the Spanish of Buenos Aires is spoken with a distinctly Italian accent due to the large number of Italian in the city and the closeness of the two languages.