Italian translation

La lingua italiana

Language Connect provides professional Italian into English and English into Italian translations. Our mother tongue Italian translators only translate into Italian and habitually use Italian so that they are continuously up-to-date with the language’s evolution. For further information visit our translation services page.

Italian is a Romance language (a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all the languages that descend from Latin) and is spoken as a first language by about 63 million people primarily in Italy. In Switzerland, Italian is one of the four official languages; it is also the official language of San Marino and the primary language of the Vatican City.

During the 14th century, the desire to ennoble and to give prestige and literary permanence to current speech moved certain classically educated writers in Florence (in the Tuscan region of what is today Italy) to create a new “Italian” written language by polishing and enriching the spoken Tuscan language of the late 1100’s and early 1200’s that was their familiar vernacular.

In fact, Florentine culture produced the three literary artists who best summarised Italian thought and feeling of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance: Petrarca, Boccaccio and, in particular, Dante Alighieri. Dante was the one who mixed southern Italian languages, especially Sicilian, with his native Tuscan ("supposed" to be derived from Etruscan and Oscan) in his epic poems known collectively as the Commedia, to which Giovanni Boccaccio later affixed the title Divina.

The elegant ideal for spoken standard Italian became “la lingua toscana in bocca romana” (“the language of Tuscany as pronounced by a native of Rome”).

It was not until the 19th century that the language spoken by educated Tuscans spread to become the language of a new nation. The unification of Italy in 1861 had a profound impact not only on the political scene but also resulted in a significant social, economical, and cultural transformation. With mandatory schooling, the literacy rate increased, and many speakers abandoned their native dialect in favour of the national language.

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