ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT LEARNING ITALIAN

Why learn Italian?

While it is true that there are not as many native Italian speakers as there are speakers of English, Spanish or German, Italian is the language of art, music, food and love! Everyone must visit Italy at least once in a life-time – the vast majority of the world’s art and monuments are in Italy. 30 million tourists visit Italy every year, many of them  to see the works of Michelangelo Buonarotti,  Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, to name but a few. It is the seat of the Vatican and home to three outstanding figures of Christianity - St. Thomas Acquinas, St Francis of Assisi and St. Catherine of Siena. Italy has also a strong tradition of cinema – one of the many pleasures of speaking and understanding Italian is to be able to watch an Italian  film in the original language The climate is wonderful, the beaches are great, the people are welcoming, and as for the food ……

Italian is a Romance language, so if you have studied French or Spanish, you will not find it difficult to learn.

Short history of the Italian language

Origins
Linguistically speaking, the Italian language is a member of the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. It is spoken principally in the Italian peninsula, southern Switzerland, San Marino, Sicily, Corsica, northern Sardinia, and on the north-eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea, as well as in North and South America. Considered a single language with numerous dialects, Italian, like the other Romance languages, is the direct offspring of the Latin spoken by the Romans and imposed by them on the peoples under their dominion. Of all the major Romance languages, Italian retains the closest resemblance to Latin. The struggle between the written but dead language and the various forms of the living speech, most of which were derived from Vulgar Latin, was nowhere so intense or so protracted as in Italy.

Development
During the long period of the evolution of Italian, many dialects sprang up.  Even the earliest popular Italian documents, produced in the 10th century, are dialectal in language, and during the following three centuries Italian writers wrote in their native dialects, producing a number of competing regional schools of literature.

During the 14th century the Tuscan dialect began to predominate, because of the central position of Tuscany in Italy, and because of the aggressive commerce of its most important city, Florence. Moreover, of all the Italian dialects, Tuscan departs least in morphology and phonology from classical Latin, and it therefore harmonizes best with the Italian traditions of Latin culture. Finally, Florentine culture produced the three literary artists who best summarized Italian thought and feeling of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance: Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio