The Italian Language

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Some changes in the pronunciation of Vulgar Latin seem to have taken place already during Imperial times. Some of these are reflected in all Romance languages, while others are specific to one language or another. Here I shall concentrate on the changes as they are reflected in the Italian language.

A universal change was the palatisation of c and g before e and i. Virtually all Romance languages and English follow this rule. In modern Italian c before a, o and u sounds like k, while before e and i it sounds like the English and Spanish ch:

To keep the sound hard before e and i an h was added in modern Italian:

T before the group iu (except before s, t and x) became palatised. In Italian it became z, pronounced ts:

Y became identical with i:

Ch, rh and th lost their respective “h”, becoming no more than c, r, and t. In modern Italian ch is used only before e and i to represent a hard sound:

Ph became identical with f:

K was replaced by c before a, o and u and by ch before e and i:

J is sporadically used in Italian, but it is more usual to find it represented by i, when its sound is of a short i or by g before e and i and gi before a, o and u when its sound is of zh:

H became silent and was eventually dropped, except before four forms of the verb “avere”: ho, hai, ha and hanno (to distinguish them from o, ai, a and anno, though for a time there was an alternative spelling for the latter: ò, ài, à, ànno). It is also used in conjunction with c and g before e and i, to keep these letters hard.

X was dropped from the Italian language, substituted by s.

U and v were separated, becoming two different letters: u retained its vowel value, while v was used to represent a sound which did not exist in Latin. It is interesting to note that the v sound is still inexistent in Spanish.

W never made its way into Italian.

Latin gn (actually two letters: g+n) became palatised, sounding a bit like the English ng in sing.