language class online available

Italian language, Italian Italiano, Romance language spoken by some 66,000,000 persons, the vast majority of whom live in Italy (including Sicily and Sardinia). It is the official language of Italy, San Marino, and (together with Latin) Vatican City. Italian is also (with German, French, and Romansh) an official language of Switzerland, where it is spoken in Ticino and Graub nden (Grisons) cantons by some 666,000 individuals. Italian is also used as a common language in France (the Alps and C te d Azur) and in small communities in Croatia and Slovenia. On the island of Corsica a Tuscan variety of Italian is spoken, though Italian is not the language of culture. Overseas (e.g., in the United States, Brazil, and Argentina) speakers sometimes do not know the standard language and use only dialect forms. Increasingly, they only rarely know the language of their parents or grandparents. Standard Italian was once widely used in Somalia and Malta, but no longer. In Libya too its use has died out.

Although Italian has a standard literary form, based on the dialect of Florence, the common speech is dialectal or a local variant of Standard Italian. The following dialect groups are distinguished: Northern Italian, or Gallo-Italian; Venetan, spoken in northeastern Italy; Tuscan (including Corsican); and three related groups from southern and eastern Italy (1) the dialects of the Marche, Umbria, and Rome, (2) those of Abruzzi, Puglia (Apulia), Naples, Campania, and Lucania, and (3) those of Calabria, Otranto, and Sicily.