Languages of Italy


There are approximately thirty-four native living spoken languages and related dialects in Italy, most of which are largely independent Romance languages. Although they are sometimes colloquially referred to as dialects or regional languages, they are almost all distributed in a continuum across the regions' administrative boundaries, and speakers from one locale within a single region are typically aware of the features distinguishing their own variety from one of the other places nearby.
The official and most widely spoken language across the country is Italian, a direct descendant of Tuscan. However, in parallel, most Italians also communicate in one of the regional languages that are indigenous evolutions of Vulgar Latin.
Other Italian languages belong to other Indo-European branches, such as Cimbrian, Arbëresh, Slavomolisano and Griko. Other non-indigenous languages are spoken by a substantial percentage of the population due to immigration.
Of the indigenous languages, twelve are officially recognized as linguistic minorities: Albanian, Catalan, German, Greek, Slovene, Croatian, French, Franco-Provençal, Friulian, Ladin, Occitan and Sardinian. However, full bilingualism is legally granted only to German, Slovene and French and enacted in the regions of Trentino Alto-Adige, Friuli Venezia Giulia and the Aosta Valley, respectively.

Language or dialect

Almost all the Romance languages native to Italy, with the notable exception of Italian, are often colloquially referred to as "dialects", although the term may coexist with other labels like "minority languages" or "vernaculars" for some of them. However, the use of the term "dialect" may erroneously imply that the native languages spoken in Italy are actual "dialects" of standard Italian in the prevailing linguistic sense of "varieties or variations of a language". This is not the case of Italy, as the country's long-standing linguistic diversity does not actually stem from Italian. Most of Italy's Romance languages predate Italian and evolved locally from Vulgar Latin, independently of what would become the standard national language, long before the fairly recent spread of Italian throughout Italy. In fact, Italian itself can be thought of as either a continuation of, or a dialect heavily based on, the Florentine dialect of Tuscan.
The indigenous Romance languages of Italy are therefore classified as separate languages that evolved from Latin just like Italian, rather than "dialects" or variations of the latter. Conversely, with the spread of Italian throughout Italy in the 20th century, local varieties of Italian have also developed throughout the peninsula, influenced to varying extents by the underlying local languages, most noticeably at the phonological level; though regional boundaries seldom correspond to isoglosses distinguishing these varieties, these variations of Italian are commonly referred to as Regional Italian.
Twelve languages have been legally granted official recognition in 1999, but their selection to the exclusion of others is a matter of some controversy. Daniele Bonamore argues that many regional languages were not recognized in light of their communities' historical participation in the construction of the Italian language: Giacomo da Lentini's and Cielo d'Alcamo's Sicilian, Guido Guinizelli's Bolognese, Jacopone da Todi's Umbrian, Neapolitan, Carlo Goldoni's Venetian and Dante's Tuscan are considered to be historical founders of the Italian linguistic majority; outside of such epicenters are, on the other hand, Friulian, Ladin, Sardinian, Franco-Provençal and Occitan, which are recognized as distinct languages. Michele Salazar found Bonamore's explanation "new and convincing".

Legal status of Italian

The original Italian Constitution does not explicitly express that Italian is the official national language. Since the constitution was penned, there have been some laws and articles written on the procedures of criminal cases passed that explicitly state that Italian should be used:

Recognition by the Italian state

The Art. 6 of the Italian Constitution was drafted by the Founding Fathers to show sympathy for the country's historical linguistic minorities, in a way for the newly-founded Republic to let them become part of the national fabric and distance itself from the Italianization policies promoted earlier because of nationalism, especially during Fascism.
However, more than a half century passed before the Art. 6 was followed by any of the above-mentioned "appropriate measures". Italy applied in fact the Article for the first time in 1999, by means of the national law N.482/99.
Before said legal framework entered into force, only four linguistic minorities enjoyed some kind of acknowledgment and protection, stemming from specific clauses within international treaties. The other eight linguistic minorities were to be recognized only in 1999, including the Slovene-speaking minority in the Province of Udine and the Germanic populations residing in provinces different from Bolzano. Some now-recognized minority groups, namely in Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Sardinia, already provided themselves with regional laws of their own. It has been estimated that less than 400.000 people, out of the two million people belonging to the twelve historical minorities, enjoyed state-wide protection.
Around the 1960s, the Italian Parliament eventually resolved to apply the previously neglected article of the country's fundamental Charter. The Parliament thus appointed a "Committee of three Sages" to single out the groups that were to be recognized as linguistic minorities, and further elaborate the reason for their inclusion. The nominated people were Tullio de Mauro, Giovan Battista Pellegrini and Alessandro Pizzorusso, three notable figures who distinguished themselves with their life-long activity of research in the field of both linguistics and legal theory. Based on linguistic, historical as well as anthropological considerations, the experts eventually selected thirteen groups, corresponding to the currently recognized twelve with the further addition of the Sinti and Romani-speaking populations. The original list was approved, with the only exception of the nomadic peoples, who lacked the territoriality requisite and therefore needed a separate law. However, the draft was presented to the law-making bodies when the legislature was about to run its course, and had to be passed another time. The bill was met with resistance by all the subsequent legislatures, being reluctant to challenge the widely-held myth of "Italian linguistic homogeneity", and only in 1999 did it eventually pass, becoming a law. In the end, the historical linguistic minorities have been recognized by the Law no. 482/1999.
Some interpretations of said law seem to divide the twelve minority languages into two groups, with the first including the non-Latin speaking populations and the second including only the Romance-speaking populations. Some other interpretations state that a further distinction is implied, considering only some groups to be "national minorities". Regardless of the ambiguous phrasing, all the twelve groups are technically supposed to be allowed the same measures of protection; furthermore, the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, signed and ratified by Italy in 1997, applies to all the twelve groups mentioned by the 1999 national law, therefore including the Friulians, the Sardinians, the Occitans, the Ladins etc., with the addition of the Romani.
In actual practice, not each of the twelve historical linguistic minorities is given the same consideration. In fact, the discrimination lies in the urgent need to award the highest degree of protection only to the French-speaking minority in the Aosta Valley and the German one in South Tyrol, owing to international treaties. For example, the institutional websites are only in Italian with a few exceptions, like a French version of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. A bill proposed by former prime minister Mario Monti's cabinet formally introduced a differential treatment between the twelve historical linguistic minorities, distinguishing between those with a "foreign mother tongue" and those with a "peculiar dialect". The bill was later implemented, but deemed unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court.

Recognition at the European level

Italy is a signatory of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, but has not ratified the treaty, and therefore its provisions protecting regional languages do not apply in the country.
The Charter does not, however, establish at what point differences in expression result in a separate language, deeming it an "often controversial issue", and citing the necessity to take into account, other than purely linguistic criteria, also "psychological, sociological and political considerations".

Regional recognition of the local languages

According to the UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, there are 31 endangered languages in Italy. The degree of endangerment is classified in different categories ranging from 'safe' to 'extinct'.
The source for the languages' distribution is the Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger unless otherwise stated, and refers to Italy exclusively.

Vulnerable

All living languages indigenous to Italy are part of the Indo-European language family.
They can be divided into Romance languages and non-Romance languages. The classification of the Romance languages of Italy is controversial, and we report here two different classification systems.

Romance languages (Ethnologue)

The source is the SIL's Ethnologue unless otherwise stated. Language classification can be a controversial issue, when a classification is contested by academic sources, this is reported in the 'notes' column.

Gallo-Rhaetian and Occitano-Romance

Gallo-Italic languages

Italo-Dalmatian languages

Not included is Corsican, which is mainly spoken on the French island of Corsica. Istriot is only spoken in Croatia. Judeo-Italian is moribund.
LanguageISO 639-3Dialects spoken in ItalyNotesSpeakers
Italian Tuscan;National language60,000,000
Central Italian Romanesco; Sabino; Marchigiano5,700,000
Neapolitan Abruzzese; Cosentino; Bari dialect3,000,000
Sicilian Salentino; Southern Calabrian4,700,000

Sardinian language

is a distinct language with significant phonological differences among its own varieties. Some linguists, like Heinrich Lausberg, proposed that Sardinian is the sole living representative its branch of the Romance languages, which used to comprise the now extinct Afro-Romance dialects as well as the Corsican dialects before they underwent Tuscanization. UNESCO, while calling Gallurese and Sassarese "Sardinian", considers them to be originally dialects of Corsican rather than Sardinian. The linguistic landscape of Sardinia is in principle most accurately described as being a dialect continuum.
LanguageISO 639-3Dialects spoken in ItalyNotesSpeakers
Campidanese Sardinian Orthographic model of the central southern Sardinian dialects500,000
Logudorese Sardinian Orthographic model of the central northern Sardinian dialects500,000
Gallurese Sardinian Outlying dialect of Corsican, sometimes considered part of Sardinian100,000
Sassarese Sardinian Outlying dialect of Corsican, sometimes considered part of Sardinian100,000

Romance languages (Loporcaro)

proposes a classification of Romance languages of Italy based on, who groups different Romance languages according to areal and some typological features. The following five linguistic areas can be identified:
The following classification is proposed by :

Albanian, Slavic, Greek and Romani languages

High German languages

Geographic distribution

Northern Italy

The Northern Italian languages are conventionally defined as those Romance languages spoken north of the La Spezia–Rimini Line, which runs through the northern Apennine Mountains just to the north of Tuscany; however, the dialects of Occitan and Franco-Provençal spoken in the extreme northwest of Italy are generally excluded. The classification of these languages is difficult and not agreed-upon, due both to the variations among the languages and to the fact that they share isoglosses of various sorts with both the Italo-Romance languages to the south and the Gallo-Romance languages to the northwest.
One common classification divides these languages into four groups:
Any such classification runs into the basic problem that there is a dialect continuum throughout northern Italy, with a continuous transition of spoken dialects between e.g. Venetian and Ladin, or Venetian and Emilio-Romagnolo.
All of these languages are considered innovative relative to the Romance languages as a whole, with some of the Gallo-Italian languages having phonological changes nearly as extreme as standard French. This distinguishes them significantly from standard Italian, which is extremely conservative in its phonology.

Southern Italy and islands

Approximate distribution of the regional languages of Sardinia and Southern Italy according to the UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger:
One common classification divides these languages into two groups:
All of these languages are considered conservative relative to the Romance languages as a whole, with Sardinian being the most conservative of them all.

Mother-tongues of foreigners

Standardised written forms

Although "most all Italian dialects were being written in the Middle Ages, for administrative, religious, and often artistic purposes," use of local language gave way to stylized Tuscan, eventually labeled Italian. Local languages are still occasionally written, but only the following regional languages of Italy have a standardised written form. This may be widely accepted or used alongside more traditional written forms: