Italian (, or lingua italiana) is a Romance language spoken by about 70 million people, primarily in Italy. Standard Italian is based on the Tuscan dialect and is somewhat intermediate between Italo-Dalmatian languages of the South and Gallo-Italian languages of the North. Like many languages written using the Latin alphabet, Italian has double consonants. However, contrary to, for example, French and Spanish, double consonants are pronounced as long (geminated) in Italian. As in most Romance languages (with the notable exception of French), stress is distinctive. Out of the Romance languages, Italian is generally considered to be the one most closely resembling Latin in terms of vocabulary, though Romanian most closely preserves the declension system of Classical Latin while Sardinian is the most conservative in terms of phonology.

History

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The history of the Italian language is quite complex but the modern standard of the language was largely shaped by relatively recent events. The earliest surviving texts which can definitely be called Italian (as opposed to its predecessor Vulgar Latin) are legal formulae from the region of Benevento dating from 960-963. Italian was first formalised in the first years of the 14th century through the works of Dante Alighieri, who mixed southern Italian languages, especially Sicilian, with his native Tuscan in his epic poems known collectively as the Commedia, to which Giovanni Boccaccio later affixed the title Divina. Dante's much-loved works were read throughout Italy and his written dialect became the "canonical standard" that others could all understand. Dante is still credited with standardizing the Italian language. Italian has always had a distinctive dialect for each city, since the cities were up until recently city-states. A well-known Italian dictum has it that the best spoken Italian is lingua toscana in bocca romana - 'the Tuscan tongue, in a Roman mouth' (Tuscan dialects spoken with Roman inflection). The Romans are known for speaking clearly and distinctly, while the Tuscan dialect (supposedly influenced by Etruscan and Oscan) is the closest existing dialect to Dante's now-standard Italian.

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