Italian · Italiano
Italian with RAI, Easy Italian, News in Slow Italian, and a carefully checked free-and-paid resource list. · 95 checked resources.
- A1–A2 starterFirst steps, free course anchors, beginner media
- B1–B2 plateauSlow news, speaking practice, denser input
- C1–C2 masteryNative broadcasters, newspapers, nuance
- Word roots100 families · open in Explorer
- Quick practiceConjugation · gender · minimal pairs
- Topic decksTravel, work, school, and more — leveled groups
- Resource listFilterable · check dates · classroom-safe
- Word-roots methodThe shared system behind Language Hacks
- Language Hacks booksSeries page on Avery J. Parker Books
- Buy on AmazonAffiliate link · tag studynewl-20
About Italian
- Language family
-
Indo-European, Italic, Romance Source: Glottolog ital1282
- Where it's spoken
- Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City
- Speakers
-
roughly 65 million native speakers Estimate source: Ethnologue language page (ita)
- Writing
- Latin
Italian evolved from the Tuscan dialect of Vulgar Latin and was popularized as a literary standard by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in the 13th and 14th centuries, long before political unification in 1861 made it a national language. Of the major Romance languages, it retains vocabulary and sounds closest to Latin. Its cognate overlap with Spanish, French, and Portuguese makes it a natural second Romance language to add.
Speaker counts are approximate orders of magnitude for learners, not census figures. Family labels follow Glottolog-style classification; vitality notes (when shown) follow UNESCO WAL / Ethnologue-style framing and should be re-checked for program planning.
Sources
- ISO 639-3:
ita - Glottocode:
ital1282 - Ethnologue — Italian (ita)
- Glottolog — Italian (ital1282)