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According to Minority Rights Group International: "The ethnic Albanian (Arbëresh) dialects of Italy bear little resemblance to the standard language or dialects of Albania, as they have been cut off from the main language for around 500 years. Some dialects spoken in Italy are so dissimilar that ethnic Albanians use Italian as a lingua franca ...
The Veronese Riddle (c. 8th or early 9th century), a riddle reflecting either a form of Medieval Latin or the earliest extant example of a vernacular Romance language in Italy. The Italian language has developed through a long and slow process, which began after the Western Roman Empire's fall and the onset of the Middle Ages in the 5th century ...
Italian is an official language in Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City and western Istria (in Slovenia and Croatia).It used to have official status in Albania, Malta and Monaco, where it is still widely spoken, as well as in former Italian East Africa and Italian North Africa regions where it plays a significant role in various sectors.
Regional Italian (Italian: italiano regionale, pronounced [itaˈljaːno redʒoˈnaːle]) is any regional [note 1] variety of the Italian language.. Such vernacular varieties and standard Italian exist along a sociolect continuum, and are not to be confused with the local non-immigrant languages of Italy [note 2] that predate the national tongue or any regional variety thereof.
A notable example is the word casa ('house'): in northern Italy it is pronounced [ˈkaːza]; in southern-central Italy it is pronounced [ˈkaːsa]. In several southern varieties, voiceless stops tend to be voiced if following a sonorant, as an influence of the still largely spoken regional languages: campo /ˈkampo/ is often pronounced [ˈkambo ...
The base alphabet consists of 21 letters: five vowels (A, E, I, O, U) and 16 consonants. The letters J, K, W, X and Y are not part of the proper alphabet, but appear in words of ancient Greek origin (e.g. Xilofono), loanwords (e.g. "weekend"), [2] foreign names (e.g. John), scientific terms (e.g. km) and in a handful of native words—such as the names Kalsa, Jesolo, Bettino Craxi, and Cybo ...
The language has no official status within Italy and is not taught in schools. The University of Naples Federico II offers (from 2003) courses in Campanian Dialectology at the faculty of Sociology, whose actual aim is not to teach students to speak the language but to study its history, usage, literature and social role.
Italian, adopted by the central state after the unification of Italy, is a language based on the Florentine variety of Tuscan and is somewhat intermediate between the Italo-Dalmatian languages and the Gallo-Romance languages. Its development was also influenced by the Germanic languages of the post-Roman invaders.