Florentine dialect


The Florentine dialect or vernacular is a variety of Tuscan language, a Romance language, spoken in the Italian city of Florence and its hinterlands. Being the language spoken in the capital city of the Tuscan state, it attracted and unified all other Tuscan varieties.
A received pedagogical variant derived from it historically, once called la pronuncia fiorentina emendata, was officially prescribed as the national language of the Kingdom of Italy, when it was established in 1861.

Literature

Famous writers such as Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio and, later, Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini originally wrote in Literary Tuscan/Florentine, perhaps the best-known example being Dante's Divine Comedy.

Differences from Standard Italian

Florentine, and Tuscan more generally, can be distinguished from Standard Italian by differences in numerous features at all levels: phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon.
Perhaps the difference most noticed by Italians and foreigners alike is known as the gorgia toscana, a consonant-weakening rule widespread in Tuscany in which the voiceless plosive phonemes,, are pronounced between vowels as fricatives,, respectively. The sequence la casa 'the house', for example, is pronounced, and buco 'hole' is realized as. Preceded by a pause or a consonant, is produced as . Similar alternations obtain for →, and →,. Something similar occurs in Hebrew and in Spanish.
Strengthening to a geminate consonant occurs when the preceding word triggers syntactic doubling so the initial consonant of pipa 'pipe ' has three phonetic forms: in spoken as a single word or following a consonant, if preceded by a vowel as in la pipa 'the pipe' and in tre pipe 'three pipes'.
Parallel alternations of the affricates and are also typical of Florentine but by no means confined to it or even to Tuscan. The word gelato is pronounced with following a pause or a consonant, following a vowel and if raddoppiamento occurs.