Italian · Italiano

About Italian

Language family

Indo-European, Italic, Romance

Where it's spoken

Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City

Speakers

roughly 65 million native speakers

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.