where does Italian come from?
The Italian language derives from the Latin spoken in the Italian peninsula and is thus its evolution. Many linguists agree on defining it the direct offspring of Latin, and the second closest language to it. Italian is only second to Sardinian, a vernacular spoken in Sardinia, Italy, which retains a great deal of Late Latin morphological constructions and phonological features.
Italian, like the other Romance languages, evolved from the Latin spoken by ordinary people. But the great influence of the Catholic Church (Latin is the main official language of the Vatican City State, although Italian has official status too. In the Holy See, however, only Latin is recognised as the official language), and the study of Classical Latin poets, philosophers and thinkers had an intense conservative impact on Italian.
One of the changes that would mark the difference between Classical Latin and Vulgar Latin* is the loss of final consonants, such as -m, -s, -n -t, which most of all are indicative of case and grammatical number. When these consonants began to not be pronounced, confusion sprung, as declensions ruled Latin grammar. Words like cane(m), pane(m), us(s), nome(n) and ama(t) were pronounced like cane, pane, usu, nome and ama. These corrupted forms finally became standard in Italian as cane, pane, uso (final -ŭ /ʊ/ > -o), nome, ama, and eventually contributed to the merging/disappearance of most declensions and cases. However, as most graffiti in Pompeii (Naples, Italy) attest, the final consonant dropping was already in action in the I century AD.
* Vulgar means spoken by the vulgus, that is to say the common people.
After a slow evolutionary process, Latin fragmented into a variety of different sub-languages in Italy. These languages change from region to region, but differences in accents, vocabulary and syntax can vary from village to village as well. Only one of these ‘dialects’ was destined to become Italy’s official language: Florentine.
Florentine was/is the language spoken in Florence, which is a variety of Tuscan, the language spoken in Tuscany, Italy. Tuscan poets such as Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarca (12th century), to only name a few, all employed their Tuscan variety in their literary work.
Due to their great importance and prestige, the Florentine language was starting to be regarded as one of the few languages –if not the only one– that would finally equal Latin. Florentine had thousands and thousands of words and speakers of Florentine could elegantly and effortlessly converse about anything.
“It’s been estimated that the 90% of the fundamental vocabulary an Italian uses today (more than 2000 everyday words, that it to say the 90% of everything an Italian person says, reads or writes everyday) had already been written in Dante’s Divine Comedy (which does not mean that it is a comedy by the way). Dante gave the Italian language new terminology, ranging from philosophy to astronomy, constituting the base of an intellectual vocabulary.” (x).
For all these reasons, people nowadays consider Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio the fathers of Modern Italian because they proved that Florentine could rival Latin, no matter what context. From then on, Florentine began to be regarded as a full literary language and started to be adopted by most kingdoms in Italy.
Today, Italian has official or co-official status in Italy, San Marino, Vatican City State, Switzerland, three municipalities of Slovenia, Slovenian Istria and Croatia, while it held official status in Somalia until 1963, in Etiopia until 1943, in Eritrea until 1941, in Malta until 1934 and in Corsica and Nice until 1859.
