Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
not so long ago - for example when my grandmother was a child - the Italian people used
to speak their dialect, and the Italian language was like a foreign language they had to learn
at school (if they used to go to school).
Until the second half of the 19
th
century only few people were able to speak Italian.
In 1861 there was the proclamation of the kingdom of Italy: for the first time the Italian
Peninsula was not a combination of different countries, with different languages, customs
and traditions, but it was ONE united nation, with ONE national language... in theory! In
fact it was like this only on paper, because according to the linguist Tullio De Mauro only
2.5% of the Italian population used to speak Italian (10% according to linguist and philolo-
gist Arrigo Castellani).
Nowadays everybody speaks Italian, and dialects are only used to speak in very informal
situations, within the family, with friends, mostly for jokes and common sayings, and in
some regions only the older people know and speak the dialect.
There are some places where the language is strongly influenced by the bordering coun-
tries, for example in Trentino Alto Adige (North-East) people speaks German very well
(sometimes better than Italian!), and they speak Italian with a German accent while in Valle
d'Aosta (North-West) the accent is more similar to the French language, and the French
language is the official language together with Italian.
Countries where Italian is spoken
Italian is spoken as a native and official language in 4 countries: Italy (59 million people),
Switzerland, San Marino and Vatican City and it is the second official language in Malta,
Slovenia and Croatia (for a total of 14 million people).
And now, let's start! And... don't worry, you are not going to learn all the Italian dialects
but just the real Italian language!!!
