Romance Philology

As Portuguese, Spanish, French and Romanian, Italian is a Romance language which evolved from Vulgar Latin. For Thomas Mann there was »no doubt that angels in the Sky speak Italian. Impossible to imagine«, he wrote, »that these blessed creatures use a less musical language.«

On Earth, instead, Italian is the official language of Italy, Switzerland (cantons of Ticino and Grisons), San Marino, and the Vatican City State. It is also spoken in the Principality of Monaco (along with ›Monegasco‹, a Ligurian dialect, and French). Italian is granted an official minority status in Istria (Slovenia and Croatia), while ›Talian‹, a dialect of the Venetian idiom, is a co-official language in some municipalities of the Brasilian states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina. Corsican is very similar to Italian; traditionally considered as an Italian dialect, it is now categorized as a language.

Italian has approximately 85 million native speakers worldwide, out of which 65 million in Europe. It is the continent's fourth most spoken language, after Russian, German, and French. Italian is spoken by 1.5 million people in Argentina, 900,000 in Australia, 710,000 in the USA, 500,000 in Brazil (›Talian‹, and São Paulo area), 320,000 in Canada, and 200,000 in Venezuela. Until the 1970s, a Pidgin Italian was spoken in some areas of the former Italian colonies of Somalia and Eritrea, where standard Italian is still widely understood and spoken. While it is only 22nd on the world's list of most spoken languages (it ranked 13th in 1900), Italian is fourth on the list of the most commonly learned foreign languages in the world.

Among the major Romance languages, Italian is closest to Latin, with a difference of just 12%. Only Sardinian shows a lower rate of divergence (8%), while it is much higher in the case of Spanish (20%), Romanian (23.5%), Portuguese (31%), and French (44%).

What makes Romanian special?

• Romanian partly preserves the Latin case declension of nouns (nominative/accusative, genitive/dative, vocative), while other Romance languages reduced it drastically, replacing it by prepositions preceding the noun (genitive: de + ablative; dative: a + accusative)

• the definitive article is attached to the end of the noun as in other languages of the Balkan Language Area (Balkansprachbund) or, e.g., in Danish

• Romanian has three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter, the latter being masculine in the singular and feminin in the plural

• Romanian widely uses a subjunctive in place of an infinitive: vreau să merg  -  I want to go (literally, I want that I go)

• around 14% of the Romanian vocabulary stemms from Slavic (cf., approx. 8% of the Spanish vocabulary is of Arabic origin). The etymology of Romanian place names deserves particular mention.