Language Profile Italian
Italian is spoken by about 63 million primarily in Italy and in Ticino and Grigioni cantons in Switzerland, and by around 110 – 120 million as a second or cultural language. It is also the second official language in the Vatican City and in some areas of Slovenia and Croatia (Istria) with an Italian minority. It is widely used and taught in Monaco and Malta and extensively understood in France with over one million speakers (especially in Corsica and the County of Nice), and in Albania.
Italian is a Romance language – belonging to the Indo-European language family that descend from Latin, the language of ancient Rome – together with Spanish, Portuguese, French and Romanian, among others. It is estimated that lexical similarity is 89% with French, 82% with Spanish and 77% with Romanian. As in most Romance languages stress is distinctive.
Italy has always had a distinctive dialect for each city since the cities were until recently thought of as city-states. As Tuscan-derived Italian came to be used throughout the nation, features of local speech were naturally adopted, producing various versions of Regional Italian, termed ‘dialects’. Dialects are generally not used for mass communication and are usually limited to native speakers in informal contexts. Younger generations speak almost exclusively standard Italian in all situations, usually with local accents and idioms. Regional differences can be recognized by various factors: the openness of vowels, the length of the consonants, and some colloquialisms coming from the local dialect.
Writing: Italian is written using the Latin alphabet. The letters J, K, W, X and Y are not considered part of the standard 21-letter Italian alphabet, but appear in loanwords (such as jeans, whisky, taxi). Unlike in Spanish or in French, to mark the accent is not mandatory unless it falls on the last vowel of a word (i.e. caffé, coffee, or gioventù, youth).
Learning Italian is easy because:
Italian is easy to pronounce being a phonemic language. Groups of letters are always pronounced in the same way, so once learnt specific syllable sounds (for instance chi sounds like ‘ki’) you will be able to pronounce virtually all Italian words without difficulty. Similarly, very few words start with the letter H (most notably some forms of the verb ‘to have’: ho, I have), and in these cases it is always silent.
Italian words are commonly used in English in a variety of situations (food, music, art). Also, English and Italian share a lot of vocabulary, either by direct sharing or words borrowed from French or Latin. This means that you are likely to have a fairly broad starting vocabulary, and that the meaning of many words can be intuitively worked out.
Italian doesn’t have a specific construction to formulate a question (unlike for instance ‘Are you French?’ in English) but intonation determines whether a sentence is a question or an assertion. This is something less to worry about, and the emphasis given to the intonation contributes to the ‘musicality’ often attributed to the Italian language – which is part of the pleasure of speaking it from the very beginning!
Learning Italian is challenging because:
All Italian words have a grammatical gender (masculine or feminine) and there are seven definite articles (il, lo, la, l’, i, gli and le, corresponding to the single English ‘the’) that accompany them, according to their gender, number (singular and plural) and whether the word starts with a vowel, a simple consonant or a specific group of consonants or letters (s + consonant, z, ps, gn).
Italian grammar is quite complex, with several grammatical tenses (Present, Past, Future tenses in simple, perfect and continuous forms) and grammatical moods (Indicative, Imperative, Conditional and Subjunctive Moods), some not found in the English language, for instance the Subjunctive Mood used in Italian to express subjective opinions and doubts (Penso che questo libro sia interessante, ‘I think that this book is interesting’).
In Italian there are many irregular verbs, among which are those of most common use (andare, ‘to go’, fare ‘to do’, venire ‘to come’). However, these follow a fairly regular pattern that makes learning and using them less demanding.
Italian with Cactus:
Cactus provides Italian language training as 1:1 programs, closed groups for in-house company training, full-immersion courses, online courses, self-study, and on public evening courses.