Language

The official language of Italy is Standard Italian, descendant of Tuscan dialect and a direct descendant of Latin (some 75% of Italian words are of Latin origin.) However, when Italy was unified in 1861, Italian existed mainly as a literary language, and was spoken by less than 3% of the population. Different languages were spoken throughout the Italian peninsula, many of which were Romance languages which had developed in every region, due to political fragmentation of Italy. Indeed, each historical region of Italy had its own so-called 'dialetto' (with 'dialect' usually meaning, improperly, a non-Italian Romance language), with variants existing at the township-level.

Massimo d'Azeglio, one of Cavour's ministers, is said to have stated, following Italian unification, that having created Italy, all that remained was to create Italians. Given the high number of languages spoken throughout the peninsula, it was quickly established that 'proper' or 'standard' Italian would be based on the Florentine dialect spoken in most of Tuscany. A national education system was established - leading to a decrease in variation in the languages spoken throughout the country over time. But it was not until the 1960s, when economic growth enabled widespread access to the television programmes of the state television broadcaster, RAI, that Italian truly became broadly-known and quite standardised.

Today, despite regional variations in the form of accents and vowel emphasis, Italian is fully comprehensible to most throughout the country. Nevertheless certain local idioms have become cherished beacons of regional variation - the Neapolitan which is extensively used for the singing of popular folk-songs, for instance - and in recent years many people have developed a particular pride in their local dialects.

In addition to the various regional linguistic varieties and dialects of standard Italian, a number of languages enjoying some form of official recognition are spoken. For example, in the north, the province of Bolzano has a majority German-speaking population; the area was awarded to Italy following the First World War and her defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Pockets of German speakers also persist in other north Italian regions: the Cimbrians in Veneto (Asiago, Luserna, and others) and the Walsers in Val'Aosta (Gressoney). In total, some 300,000 or so Italians speak German as their first language and indeed many identify themselves as ethnic Austrians.

Other regional languages include:

Some 120,000 or so people live in the Aosta Valley region, where a dialect of Franco-Provençal is spoken, similar to dialects spoken in France. About 1,400 people living in two isolated towns in Foggia speak another dialect of Franco-Provençal.
About 80,000 Slovene-speakers live in the north-eastern region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia near the border with Slovenia.
In the Dolomite mountains of Trentino-South Tyrol and Veneto there are some 40,000 speakers of the Rhaetian language Ladin.
A very large community of some 700,000 people in Friuli speak Friulian - another Rhaetian language.
In the Molise region of central-south Italy some 4,000 people speak Molise Croatian. These are the Molise Croats, descendants of a group of people who migrated from the Balkans in the Middle Ages.
Scattered across southern Italy (Salento and Calabria) are a number of some 30,000 Greek-speakers - considered to be the last surviving traces of the region's Greek heritage. (Ancient Greek colonists reached southern Italy and Sicily about 1500 BC.) They speak a Greek dialect, Griko.
Some 15,000 Catalan speakers reside around the area of Alghero in the north-west corner of Sardinia, believed to be the result of a migration of a large group of Catalans from Barcelona in ages past.
The Arbëreshë, of whom there are around 100,000 in southern Italy and in central Sicily - the result of past migrations - are speakers of the Arbëresh dialect of Albanian.
Sicilianu is spoken in Sicily by 4,832,520 people, nearly the entire population of the island. Again, it is commonly assumed to be a dialect, though it is distinct enough from Italian to be classified separately by Ethnologue.
Finally, the largest group of non-Italian speakers, some 1.3 million people, are those who speak Sardinian, a Romance language which retains many pre-Latin words.