Interesting facts about the
Italian language
Dante Alighieri,
perhaps the most famous Italian writer of all time, penned The Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia), which was completed
in 1320, a year before his death. In the late Middle Ages, the vast majority of
poetry and literary works were written in Latin, but Dante was a proponent of
vernacular literature that used the common language of the people. He wrote The
Divine Comedy in the Tuscan dialect, a choice that would set the standard for
Italian literature and position Tuscan Italian as the language of high culture
and the basis for the ‘standard’ Italian spoken today. For his role in establishing
modern Italian, Dante is often referred to as the “father of the Italian
language.”
T
he Italian alphabet has only
21 letters. Italian uses the same Roman characters as the English language…
minus 5 of them. The letters j, k, w, x, and y simply do not exist in Italian,
so if you happen to see them used in an Italian text, that means the word is
borrowed from another language!
Among
those eager to learn Italian are people who have an interest in theatre,
history of art, film studies, restoration, dress design, industrial design,
comparative literature, cultural studies and culinary skills, to name a few. Italian
is also the language of classical music. Anyone who has studied or played music
will be familiar with terms like crescendo,
forte, soprano, alto, and a tempo. Musical notation became
commonplace during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, and as many of the most
important composers of that time were Italian, the Italian language became the
standard for musicians around the globe. Italian
is spoken by over 85 million people worldwide. It is the first language of some
65 million people, and the second language of a further 15 million people. In
addition to being the national language of Italy, Italian is one of the
national languages of Switzerland, with which it shares its northern border, as
well as San Marino and Vatican City. It is also the second most spoken language
in Argentina, where it is estimated that over half the population is of Italian
descent, making Italians the largest ethnic group in the country. Italian is the 5th most studied language in the United States.
Links:
Italiano - Insegnare e Imparare