Italian

Italian (italiano) is a Romance language of the Italo-Romance branch with ~65M L1 and ~85M total speakers, official in Italy, San Marino, Vatican City, and Switzerland (Canton Ticino + parts of Graubünden). It is the closest of the major Romance languages to Latin in phonology and morphology, retaining doubled consonants (gemination), Latin-style 7-vowel system (a/ɛ/e/i/ɔ/o/u), and SVO word order with rich verbal inflection across moods, tenses, and person/number. Standard Italian descends specifically from the Florentine dialect of Tuscan, established as the literary prestige variety through the 14th-century "Three Crowns" — Dante Alighieri (Divina Commedia, 1308-1320), Petrarca (Canzoniere), and Boccaccio (Decameron) — whose works gave Tuscan continental prestige. The Accademia della Crusca (founded 1583, the world's first language academy) codified spelling and lexicon through its Vocabolario (1612). Standard Italian became the national language only after political unification (1861) and television-driven dialect leveling in the 20th century; ~30% of Italians still use one of the major regional dialects (Lombard, Venetian, Neapolitan, Sicilian) — many of which are linguistically separate Romance languages — alongside the standard. Lingua franca of opera, classical music, art history, and high cuisine.