The Italian Language

Learn about the Italian language, grammar, vocabulary and culture

Origins of the Italian Language

The Italian language is an Indo-European language, belonging to the Latin, or Romance group of languages. It is derived from Latin, a dead language which originated in Latium (Lazio in modern Italian), the region around Rome and from where the word Latin derives. It became by the I Century AD the Lingua franca of the Western provinces of the Roman Empire, which was to become, after the adoption of Christianity in 312 AD and the division of Empire in two, the Western Roman Empire. Though Latin was also spoken in the East, Greek was by far more common, a situation which eventually lead to the demise of the former as time went on and the Eastern Roman Empire mutated into the Byzantine Empire.

Latin was by no means the only language spoken in the ancient Italic Peninsula, but it was the only one to have survived into Imperial times. Other languages, long since dead, were Oscan, Ligurian, Sabine and Etruscan. Some, like Oscan, were believed to be related to Latin, while others were completely unrelated, like Ligurian and Etruscan. The latter, though a written language, has not yet been successfully understood. It has, however, given us many place names in their ancient homeland, the principal being “Tuscany” (Toscana in Italian), which derives from Tuscum, (Etruria in Latin). Other examples are Fiesole, a town not far from Florence, Volterra and Chiusi.

Latin was spread throughout Europe, Asia and Africa by the conquering Roman legions, beginning with the Italian peninsula and the islands, followed by the Iberian peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal), Gaul (modern France), the British isles, the Rhine valley (modern Western Germany and Switzerland), the Danube valley (Modern Southern Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Romania), as well as the northern shore of Africa (Modern Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Egypt and Tunisia).
		The maximum extent of the Roman Empire

The continuous invasion of the western provinces of the Empire by Germanic tribes fleeing nomadic attackers from central Asia resulted in the eventual collapse of the last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, in 476 AD and led to the establishment of various centres of power, dominated by the various Barbarian tribes, whose mother tongues were not Latin. In the Italian peninsula these rulers came to include, among others, the Longobards, whose domain included not only the modern Italian province of Lombardy, but also the so-called Duchy of Spoleto in the south-central portion of the peninsula. Rome had already been abandoned by the government of the Western Roman Empire in favour of the more defensible city of Ravenna, on the Adriatic Coast. the Latin-speaking Empire lost all linguistic and political unity, retaining only as unifying elements the written examples of Roman civil law and the text of the so-called Vulgate bible translated in 385-404 AD from the Greek by Saint Jerome.

Even though dominating militarily the remains of the Roman Empire, the Barbarians were in turn dominated culturally by the now subject peoples, sometimes disappearing and leaving little trace of their existence, apart from a few words, place-names and pronunciation of the local Romance language. These changes were felt more in regions where the Barbarian tribes took longer to be absorbed, such as Gaul, or in regions which were subject to further foreign domination, such as Dacia, which was later under Slavic rule.

The word Barbarian, contrary to modern usage, had no negative connotations to the Ancient Greeks and Romans. It simply referred to peoples who lived beyond the borders of their countries; many of the so-called Barbarians were highly civilised peoples, such as the Scythians. The word still survives today in Berber, the name of the non-Arab people and language of North-Africa.

There were two forms of Latin in the Ancient World:

As the spread of Latin was due more to a military rather than a cultural presence, it was Vulgar Latin which gave origin to the totality of the modern Romance languages. It would be more correct to state that all romance languages, including the Italian language, derive not from Latin, but from Vulgar Latin.

Even in Classical times the grammar of the vulgar speech was simpler than that of the standard language. As time went on and the Empire disintegrated, the latter diverged more and more from the Latin norm, making it increasingly difficult to be understood by the common people, to the point the Church had to instruct priests to use the vernacular to be understood by the flock.