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Italian dialects may refer to: Regional Italian, any regional variety of the Italian language; Languages of Italy, any language spoken in Italy, regardless of origin;
Southern Latian dialect; Swiss Italian; T. Tuscan dialect This page was last edited on 4 September 2019, at 13:48 (UTC). Text is available under the Creative ...
[19] [18] In fact, Standard Italian itself can be thought of as either a continuation of, or a dialect heavily based on, the Florentine dialect of Tuscan. The indigenous Romance languages of Italy are therefore classified as separate languages that evolved from Latin just like Standard Italian, rather than "dialects" or variations of the latter.
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.
The Romance dialects of Italy are local evolutions of spoken Latin that pre-date the establishment of Italian, and as such are sister languages to the Tuscan that was the historical source of Italian. They can be quite different from Italian and from each other, with some belonging to different linguistic branches of Romance.
The most important differences among dialects is in the lexicon, which also distinguishes the different subdialects. The Tuscan lexicon is almost entirely shared with Standard Italian, but many words may be perceived as obsolete or literary by non-Tuscans. There are also many strictly-regional words and expressions. Characteristically-Tuscan words:
In Neapolitan, for example, the gender and number of a word is expressed by a change in the accented vowel because it no longer distinguishes final unstressed /a/, /e/ and /o/ (e.g. luongo [ˈlwoŋɡə], longa; Italian lungo, lunga; masc. "long", fem. "long"), whereas in Italian it is expressed by a change in the final vowel. These and other ...
These languages derive, without exception, from Vulgar Latin but not from Tuscan; therefore it follows that the name "Italian" is a purely geographical reference. Today, Extreme Southern Italian dialects are still spoken daily, although their use is limited to informal contexts and is mostly oral.