Legally, the highest legal status in the Apennine Peninsula is assigned to the Italian one. In other words, the state language of Italy is the only one - Italian. However, not only nature, cuisine, songs and customs, but also dialects on the territory of Italy are very different, and therefore an islander from Capri will not understand a resident of Milan from the first seven notes.
Some statistics and facts
- The northern dialects of Italian traditionally include the idioms common above the conventional line between La Spezia and Rimini.
- The central ones are in use to the south, halfway up to the Rome-Ancona line.
- The south-central ones can be heard in the north of Umbria, in Perugia, the center of the Marche region and in the northwest of Lazio. This also includes the Roman dialect.
- Southern ones are the dialects of Abruzzo, Molise, Apulian, Lucanian and Campanian dialects.
- The Far South speaks Salentine, South Calabrian and Sicilian dialects.
- In total, there are more than a hundred dialects and adverbs in Italy.
History and modernity
The state language of Italy was formed on the basis of the Romance dialects that appeared as a result of the transformation of the folk version of Latin. The dialect of Tuscany is taken as the basis of literary Italian. This area was once inhabited by the Etruscan tribes.
The history of the Italian language, like the culture of the country, has several periods. The first written evidence of its existence appeared in the 10th century. In the 12th century, Italian is cultivated in the Montecassino monastery, where the largest library of ancient and early Christian literature in Europe is gradually being collected. Two centuries later, the Tuscan dialect was finally established as the literary language of Italy.
The positions of the Italian dialects, despite their vitality, were significantly weakened during the First World War, when soldiers from different regions were forced to communicate in a single literary Italian.
Tourist notes
A country oriented towards foreign travelers makes every effort to make a foreigner feel as comfortable as possible in its cities. The vast majority of Italians, employed in the service sector and travel services, speak English - waiters, shop assistants and hotel receptionists.
Tourist Information Centers offer a wealth of information and audio guides in English, German and French, while popular beach resorts have duplicate restaurant menus and hotel information in Russian.
