Italian language courses

Italian (lingua italiana) — official language of Italy, Vatican (along with Latin), San Marino, Switzerland (along with German, French and Swiss Rhaeto-Romanic). It is recognized as the second official language in several districts of Croatia and Slovenia.

Italian directly goes back to the national Latin extended to territories of Italy. In the Middle Ages when Italy was politically disconnected, the common literary language did not exist though written monuments of various dialects remained. Since the Renaissance era, the dialect of Tuscany, to be exact — Florence on which Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio wrote becomes the most prestigious. Nevertheless, highly educated people continued to call Italian "demotic" — volgare, by contrast with classical pure Latin. Since the XVIII—XIX century the uniform Italian literary language on the basis of the Tuscan dialect which is transitional between northern and southern idioms is formed. At the same time in the territory of Italy the set of dialects between which mutual understanding can be complicated is widespread: the North Italian dialects from the historical point of view are gallo-Romance, and South Italian — italo-Romance. Besides dialects, there are several regional kinds of the Italian literary language, and also a number of the idiom which are considered as separate languages, but not dialects of Italian (first of all Sardinian and Friulian).

The system of Italian is rather typical for a Romance family. In phonology there was an opposition of long and short concordants that is unusual to modern Romance languages. At lexicon besides primordial Latin fund there is a set of late, "book" loans from Latin.