II.

The Italian Languages and Dialects

During the long period of the evolution of Italian, many dialects developed out of Vulgar Latin. Today, some of these dialects are no longer mutually intelligible and have their own dialectal divisions; they are therefore languages in their own right. The Italian languages and dialects form two subsets (Gallo-Italian and Italo-Dalmatian) of the Italo-Western group of languages, one of the three sub-groups of the Romance languages. Corsican and the different varieties of the Sardinian language (spoken in Corsica and Sardinia respectively) form a separate group from Italian, the Southern sub-group of Romance languages. In the north and north-west of Italy the Gallo-Italian dialects predominate; they are Piemontese, Lombard, Venetian, Emiliano-Romagnolo, and Ligurian; they all display similar characteristics to French and Occitan. All are very different from Standard Italian, particularly Lombard, Emiliano-Romagnolo, and Piemontese; the latter of which has been greatly influenced by French. The Venetian language is spoken in Croatia and Slovenia, in addition to the Venetia area itself. South of these districts some of the Italo-Dalmatian languages are found; these are Judaeo-Italian (a Jewish language), Sicilian (spoken in Sicily), Napoletano-Calabrese (including the Neapolitan dialect), and the dialects of Italian proper, including Tuscan, Umbrian, and Molisano. Most speakers of regional Italian languages are bilingual in Standard Italian, using their local dialect for informal situations, and the standard for formal purposes. The standard literary language was taken from the Florentine dialect. The language of the eastern Alps, Friulian, which is spoken in north-eastern Venetia, is a Rhaeto-Romanic language in a different subset of the Romance languages to all of the above languages. Also in this Rhaetian subset is Ladin, spoken in the Dolomites and in Trentino-Alto Adige, near the South Tyrol region.