Widely regarded as the most beautiful, ‘sexiest’ language in the world, the Italian language has a rich heritage with captivating roots, intriguing cultural components and plenty of linguistic quirks that fascinate language enthusiasts like ourselves. Although it’s only the 20th most spoken language in the world with 63 million native speakers, millions of students are learning Italian and it’s fast-becoming one of the most attractive, popular languages to study. In this blog, we will share some interesting facts about Italian and convince you why you take it up.

Did you know that…

…Italian only became an official language in 1861.

It wasn’t until as late as 1861 that Italian became the ‘official’ language of Italy. Before the Unification of Italy (the Risorgimento), the peninsula was chaotically divided up into numerous independent states, some of which were controlled by foreign entities. The nation was split politically, but also linguistically with various dialects being spoken. After the unification, order was restored and the Tuscan dialect, Fiorentino, was chosen as the official language. Find out more about the Risorgimento in the video below:

…in Italy other dialects are still widely spoken.

Despite the Unification less than 100 years earlier, by the mid-1900s a large proportion of the population still couldn’t speak Italian. Amazingly, television majorly helped standardise the language and taught millions to read and write in Italian in the 50s. Still to this day, dialects are widely spoken across Italy, particularly amongst older generations where 32% of over 75s speak exclusively or largely in the local dialect (according to results published by istat). Figures from istat demonstrate how Italians of all generations are very plurilingual with 32% of those aged 6+ speaking another dialect on top of Italian. In fact, these dialects are particularly prevalent in the North East and South. Find out more about the dialects of Italy in the video below:

…Italian is extremely phonetic.

Unlike English, where the challenging pronunciation and spelling even deceives native speakers, Italian has a ‘shallow orthography’. In simpler terms, Italian words are generally pronounced as they are spelled. This makes it easier for learners to get to grips with speaking and reading Italian because it’s so phonetic. Beware though as learners need to be mindful of a few exceptions (when are there not). For instance, c/g make a soft sound before e or i and a hard sound with the other vowels (a, o & u) or a consonant. Examples include: ciliege (cherries), guardia (guard), coppa (cup).

…there are only 21 letters in the Italian alphabet.

It’s very easy to spot loanwords in Italian as lots of them not only come from English but also they include foreign letters like j, k, w, y and x which don’t appear in the Italian alphabet. Examples include: koala, jeep, sandwich, happy hour.

…Italian has tons of diphthongs.

A ‘diphthong‘ is a collection of two letters that create a specific sound when bunched together. Italian has quite a few which are worth memorising. For example: ‘ch‘ (sounds like hard ‘k‘ like in ‘carpet’) and ‘gl‘ (throatal sound like ‘ll‘ in ‘million’) which can both be found in conchiglie (shells), ‘gn‘ (palatal sound like ‘ny‘ in ‘Kenya’) like in ‘gnocchi‘ (yum!) etc. The video below helps explain a few of these examples in more depth:

Going to Italy this summer? Brush up on your Italian with our Pre-Holiday Italian course starting in July. Find out more here.