128-570: The pluperfect (shortening of plusquamperfect ), usually called past perfect in English, characterizes certain verb forms and grammatical tenses involving an action from an antecedent point in time. Examples in English are: "we had arrived " before the game began; "they had been writing " when the bell rang. The word derives from the Latin plus quam perfectum , "more than perfect". The word "perfect" in this sense means "completed"; it contrasts with
256-400: A past perfect progressive (or past perfect continuous ) construction, such as had been working . This is the past equivalent of the present perfect progressive , and is used to refer to an ongoing action that continued up to the past time of reference. For example: "It had been raining all night when he awoke." It is also commonly used to refer to actions that had led to consequences in
384-597: A clause subjugated to a clause whose verb is in the preterite. The second example may refer to an event that happened continuously or habitually in the past. (I.e. "After I used to find it, I would sell it" OR "After I would find it, I would sell it"). The first example, being the preterite, refers only to actions completed once in the remote past, or distant past. In Judeo-Spanish , the Latin pluperfect forms with little alteration have been preserved (e.g. final /m/ and /t/ are dropped) to express this tense ( pluskuamperfekto ), which
512-550: A huge number of civil servants and soldiers recruited from all over the country introduced many more words and idioms from their home languages— ciao is derived from the Venetian word s-cia[v]o ("slave", that is "your servant"), panettone comes from the Lombard word panetton , etc. Only 2.5% of Italy's population could speak the Italian standardized language properly when
640-464: A little over one million people in the United States speak Italian at home. Nevertheless, an Italian language media market does exist in the country. In Canada, Italian is the second most spoken non-official language when varieties of Chinese are not grouped together, with 375,645 claiming Italian as their mother tongue in 2016. Italian immigrants to South America have also brought a presence of
768-657: A local vernacular. These dialects, as they are commonly referred to, evolved from Vulgar Latin over the course of centuries, unaffected by formal standards and teachings. They are not in any sense "dialects" of standard Italian, which itself started off as one of these local tongues, but sister languages of Italian. Mutual intelligibility with Italian varies widely, as it does with Romance languages in general. The Romance languages of Italy can differ greatly from Italian at all levels ( phonology , morphology , syntax , lexicon , pragmatics ) and are classified typologically as distinct languages. The standard Italian language has
896-406: A noun and perfect participle in the ablative case, may be used in place of a pluperfect; for example: Pecuniis mercatori datis, cessit emptor , "When money had been given (more literally: Money having been given) to the merchant, the buyer left." In French , the indicative pluperfect ( Plus-que-parfait , "more than perfect") is formed by taking the appropriate form of the imperfect indicative of
1024-645: A poetic and literary origin in the works of Tuscan writers of the 12th century, and, although the grammar and core lexicon are basically unchanged from those used in Florence in the 13th century, the modern standard of the language was largely shaped by relatively recent events. However, Romance vernacular as language spoken in the Italian Peninsula has a longer history. In fact, the earliest surviving texts that can definitely be called vernacular (as distinct from its predecessor Vulgar Latin) are legal formulae known as
1152-528: A present participle; and a passive participle, also called a past participle. The active participle of break is breaking , and the passive participle is broken . Other languages have attributive verb forms with tense and aspect. This is especially common among verb-final languages , where attributive verb phrases act as relative clauses . Italian language Italian ( italiano , pronounced [itaˈljaːno] , or lingua italiana , pronounced [ˈliŋɡwa itaˈljaːna] )
1280-417: A renewed interest in linguistics in the 16th century, sparked a debate that raged throughout Italy concerning the criteria that should govern the establishment of a modern Italian literary and spoken language. This discussion, known as questione della lingua (i.e., the problem of the language ), ran through the Italian culture until the end of the 19th century, often linked to the political debate on achieving
1408-558: A result. Starting in late medieval times in much of Europe and the Mediterranean, Latin was replaced as the primary commercial language by languages of Italy, especially Tuscan and Venetian. These varieties were consolidated during the Renaissance with the strength of Italy and the rise of humanism and the arts . Italy came to enjoy increasing artistic prestige within Europe. A mark of
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#17328521760231536-436: A sentence. For example: "The woman spoke softly." "The athlete ran faster than the official." "The boy wept ." A transitive verb is followed by a noun or noun phrase . These noun phrases are not called predicate nouns, but are instead called direct objects because they refer to the object that is being acted upon. For example: "My friend read the newspaper." "The teenager earned a speeding ticket." A way to identify
1664-474: A single language is that they have evolved so that they are no longer mutually intelligible ; this diagnostic is effective if mutual intelligibility is minimal or absent (e.g. in Romance, Romanian and Portuguese), but it fails in cases such as Spanish-Portuguese or Spanish-Italian, as educated native speakers of either pairing can understand each other well if they choose to do so; however, the level of intelligibility
1792-456: A slightly different word order, and is formed with the preterite form of ha ( have in English), i.e. hade ( had in English), plus the supine form of the main verb: När jag kom dit hade han gått hem - When I arrived there he had gone home . In Korean the pluperfect is formed by adding an additional "었". "었" is a morpheme that is analogous to the suffix "ed" in English, in that it
1920-403: A transitive verb can often drop its object and become intransitive; or an intransitive verb can take an object and become transitive. For example, in English the verb move has no grammatical object in he moves (though in this case, the subject itself may be an implied object, also expressible explicitly as in he moves himself ); but in he moves the car , the subject and object are distinct and
2048-494: A transitive verb is to invert the sentence, making it passive. For example: "The newspaper was read by my friend." "A speeding ticket was earned by the teenager." Ditransitive verbs (sometimes called Vg verbs after the verb give ) precede either two noun phrases or a noun phrase and then a prepositional phrase often led by to or for . For example: "The players gave their teammates high fives." "The players gave high fives to their teammates." When two noun phrases follow
2176-474: A transitive verb, the first is an indirect object, that which is receiving something, and the second is a direct object, that being acted upon. Indirect objects can be noun phrases or prepositional phrases. Double transitive verbs (sometimes called Vc verbs after the verb consider ) are followed by a noun phrase that serves as a direct object and then a second noun phrase, adjective, or infinitive phrase. The second element (noun phrase, adjective, or infinitive)
2304-504: A united Italian state. Renaissance scholars divided into three main factions: A fourth faction claimed that the best Italian was the one that the papal court adopted, which was a mixture of the Tuscan and Roman dialects. Eventually, Bembo's ideas prevailed, and the foundation of the Accademia della Crusca in Florence (1582–1583), the official legislative body of the Italian language, led to
2432-411: Is down the street." The main copular verb be is manifested in eight forms be , is , am , are , was , were , been , and being in English. The number of arguments that a verb takes is called its valency or valence . Verbs can be classified according to their valency: Weather verbs often appear to be impersonal (subjectless, or avalent) in null-subject languages like Spanish , where
2560-427: Is 89% with French, 87% with Catalan , 85% with Sardinian , 82% with Spanish, 80% with Portuguese , 78% with Ladin , 77% with Romanian . Estimates may differ according to sources. One study, analyzing the degree of differentiation of Romance languages in comparison to Latin (comparing phonology , inflection , discourse , syntax , vocabulary , and intonation ), estimated that distance between Italian and Latin
2688-668: Is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire . Italian is the least divergent language from Latin , together with Sardinian (meaning that Italian and Sardinian are the most conservative Romance languages). Spoken by about 85 million people, including 67 million native speakers (2024), Italian is an official language in Italy , San Marino , Switzerland ( Ticino and
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#17328521760232816-729: Is also spoken by a minority in Monaco and France, especially in the southeastern part of the country. Italian was the official language in Savoy and in Nice until 1860, when they were both annexed by France under the Treaty of Turin , a development that triggered the " Niçard exodus ", or the emigration of a quarter of the Niçard Italians to Italy, and the Niçard Vespers . Giuseppe Garibaldi complained about
2944-508: Is also used to form the simple past tense. Thus In some of the Slavic languages the pluperfect has fallen out of use or is rarely used; pluperfect meaning is often expressed using the ordinary past tense, with some adverb (such as "earlier") or other periphrastic construction to indicate prior occurrence. Ukrainian and Belarusian preserve a distinct pluperfect ( давньоминулий час or запрошлы час – davńomynulyj čas or zaprošły čas ) that
3072-592: Is an additional way to construct a pluperfect by doubling the perfect tense particles. This is called doubled perfect ( doppeltes Perfekt ) or super perfect ( Superperfekt ) in German and plus past perfect ( temps surcomposé ) in French. These forms are not commonly used in written language and they are not taught in school. Both languages allow to construct a past tense with a modal verb (like English "to have", in German "haben", in French "avoir"), for example "I have heard it". This
3200-433: Is called a complement, which completes a clause that would not otherwise have the same meaning. For example: "The young couple considers the neighbors wealthy people." "Some students perceive adults quite inaccurately." "Sarah deemed her project to be the hardest she has ever completed." Copular verbs ( a.k.a. linking verbs) include be , seem , become , appear , look , and remain . For example: "Her daughter
3328-537: Is considered archaic and is rarely used even in literary language. In Polish pluperfect is only found in texts written in or imitating Old Polish, when it was formed with past (perfect) tense of być "to be" and past participle of the main verb. The person marking is movable, e.g. zrobił byłem ~ zrobiłem był "I had done". Past tense of the adjectival verbs ( powinienem był zrobić "I should have done") and conditional mood ( zrobiłbym był "I would have done") are often wrongly considered pluperfect forms – morphologically,
3456-424: Is formed by combining the auxiliary verb had with the past participle of the main verb, as in had jumped or had written , often used in its contracted form ' d , as in I'd jumped . It is commonly called the past perfect, being a combination of perfect aspect (marked by the use of the have auxiliary with the past participle) and past tense (marked by the use of the past tense of that auxiliary, had ). It
3584-587: Is formed by preceding the verb with buv / bula in Ukrainian and byŭ / była in Belarusian (literally, 'was'). It was and still is used in daily speech, especially in rural areas. Being mostly unused in literature during Soviet times, it is now regaining popularity. Here is an example of usage: Ja vže buv pіšov, až raptom zhadav... (Ukrainian) and Ja ŭžo byŭ pajšoŭ, kali raptam zhadaŭ (Belarusian) I almost had gone already when I recalled... In Slovenian ,
3712-455: Is formed correspondingly to French by using the imperfect of the appropriate auxiliary verb ( essere or avere ) plus the past participle. For example, Ero affamato perché non avevo mangiato I was hungry because I had not eaten. The remote pluperfect is formed by using the preterite of the appropriate auxiliary verb plus the past participle. In the Italian consecutio temporum, the trapassato remoto should be used for completed actions in
3840-528: Is higher than that between Sardinian and Latin. In particular, its vowels are the second-closest to Latin after Sardinian . As in most Romance languages, stress is distinctive. Italian is the official language of Italy and San Marino and is spoken fluently by the majority of the countries' populations. Italian is the third most spoken language in Switzerland (after German and French; see Swiss Italian ), although its use there has moderately declined since
3968-516: Is identical in form to the imperfect subjunctive. It has a similar form to the Portuguese, thus, the Portuguese example below, in Judeo-Spanish, is: Kuando yegí suve ke mi haver morera , 'When I came I knew that my friend had died'. It remains the main spoken form, though in some varieties, similarly to Spanish or Portuguese, the pluperfect is formed using the auxiliary verbs tener or aver plus
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4096-543: Is largely equivalent to the usage in English. The additional perfect tense is constructed by putting the modal verb ("to have") in the past tense as if being the full verb ("I have had") followed by the actual verb in the past particle mode ("I have had heard it"). The same applies to those verbs which require "to be" (German "sein", French "être") as the modal verb for the construction of the past tense (which would not work in English). In spoken language in Southern Germany
4224-455: Is markedly lower between Italian-Spanish, and considerably higher between the Iberian sister languages of Portuguese-Spanish. Speakers of this latter pair can communicate with one another with remarkable ease, each speaking to the other in his own native language without slang/jargon. Nevertheless, on the basis of accumulated differences in morphology, syntax, phonology, and to some extent lexicon, it
4352-498: Is neither a co-official nor a protected language in these countries. Some speakers of Italian are native bilinguals of both Italian (either in its standard form or regional varieties ) and a local language of Italy , most frequently the language spoken at home in their place of origin. Italian is a major language in Europe, being one of the official languages of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and one of
4480-458: Is not difficult to identify that for the Romance varieties of Italy, the first extant written evidence of languages that can no longer be considered Latin comes from the ninth and tenth centuries C.E. These written sources demonstrate certain vernacular characteristics and sometimes explicitly mention the use of the vernacular in Italy. Full literary manifestations of the vernacular began to surface around
4608-598: Is not permitted in Galician, so Galician uses the synthetic pluperfect exclusively. In Romanian , the pluperfect ( mai mult ca perfect ) is expressed without any auxiliary words, using a particular form of the verb, originated in the Latin pluperfect subjunctive (compare Italian imperfect subjunctive Sembrava che Elsa non venisse with Romanian pluperfect Părea că Elsa nu venise ). For example, in Când l-am întrebat, el văzuse deja filmul 'When I asked him, he had already seen
4736-436: Is one of a number of analogously formed perfect constructions, such as the present perfect ("have/has jumped"), future perfect ("will have jumped") and conditional perfect ("would have jumped"). Unlike the present perfect, the past perfect can readily be used with an adverb specifying a past time frame for the occurrence. For example, it is incorrect to say * I have done it last Friday (the use of last Friday , specifying
4864-480: Is rarely used. Sometimes (specially in journalism) the imperfect subjunctive with '-ar' termination can be used with a pluperfect sense in subordinated phrases, but it is neither normative nor recommended. In Dutch , the pluperfect ( voltooid verleden tijd ) is formed similarly as in German: the past participle ( voltooid deelwoord ) is combined with the past-tense form of the auxiliary verb hebben or zijn , depending on
4992-626: Is the main working language of the Holy See , serving as the lingua franca (common language) in the Roman Catholic hierarchy as well as the official language of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta . Italian has a significant use in musical terminology and opera with numerous Italian words referring to music that have become international terms taken into various languages worldwide. Almost all native Italian words end with vowels , and
5120-429: Is the use of auxiliary verbs or inflections to convey whether the action or state is before, simultaneous with, or after some reference point. The reference point could be the time of utterance , in which case the verb expresses absolute tense , or it could be a past, present, or future time of reference previously established in the sentence, in which case the verb expresses relative tense . Aspect expresses how
5248-421: Is traditionally described as a tense ; in modern linguistic terminology it may be said to combine tense with grammatical aspect ; namely past tense (reference to past time) and perfect aspect . It is used to refer to an occurrence that at a past time had already been started (but not necessarily completed), (e.g. "It had already been raining for a week when the big storm started."). Bernard Comrie classifies
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5376-538: Is used, and the town of Chipilo near Puebla, Mexico; each continues to use a derived form of Venetian dating back to the 19th century. Other examples are Cocoliche , an Italian–Spanish pidgin once spoken in Argentina and especially in Buenos Aires , and Lunfardo . The Rioplatense Spanish dialect of Argentina and Uruguay today has thus been heavily influenced by both standard Italian and Italian regional languages as
5504-501: The Il Globo (Australia) and the La gazzetta del Sud Africa (South Africa). Italian is widely taught in many schools around the world, but rarely as the first foreign language. In the 21st century, technology also allows for the continual spread of the Italian language, as people have new ways to learn how to speak, read, and write languages at their own pace and at any given time. For example,
5632-936: The La Voce del Popolo ( Croatia ), the Corriere d'Italia (Germany), the L'italoeuropeo (United Kingdom), the Passaparola ( Luxembourg ), the America Oggi (United States), the Corriere Canadese and the Corriere Italiano (Canada), the Il punto d'incontro (Mexico), the L'Italia del Popolo ( Argentina ), the Fanfulla (Brazil), the Gente d'Italia ( Uruguay ), the La Voce d'Italia ( Venezuela ),
5760-672: The Gallo-Italic linguistic panorama of Northern Italy , the Italo-Dalmatian , Neapolitan and its related dialects were largely unaffected by the Franco- Occitan influences introduced to Italy mainly by bards from France during the Middle Ages, but after the Norman conquest of southern Italy , Sicily became the first Italian land to adopt Occitan lyric moods (and words) in poetry. Even in
5888-816: The Grisons ), Corsica , and Vatican City . It has official minority status in Croatia , Slovenian Istria , and the municipalities of Santa Tereza and Encantado in Brazil . Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia . Italian is included under the languages covered by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Romania , although Italian
6016-649: The Kingdom of Italy in the Dodecanese ). Italian is widely spoken in Malta , where nearly two-thirds of the population can speak it fluently (see Maltese Italian ). Italian served as Malta's official language until 1934, when it was abolished by the British colonial administration amid strong local opposition. Italian language in Slovenia is an officially recognized minority language in
6144-763: The Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia ), although the masses kept speaking primarily their local vernaculars. Italian was also one of the many recognised languages in the Austro-Hungarian Empire . Italy has always had a distinctive dialect for each city because the cities, until recently, were thought of as city-states . Those dialects now have considerable variety . As Tuscan-derived Italian came to be used throughout Italy, features of local speech were naturally adopted, producing various versions of Regional Italian . The most characteristic differences, for instance, between Roman Italian and Milanese Italian are syntactic gemination of initial consonants in some contexts and
6272-539: The Placiti Cassinesi from the province of Benevento that date from 960 to 963, although the Veronese Riddle , probably from the 8th or early 9th century, contains a late form of Vulgar Latin that can be seen as a very early sample of a vernacular dialect of Italy. The Commodilla catacomb inscription is also a similar case. The Italian language has progressed through a long and slow process, which started after
6400-514: The Western Roman Empire's fall in the 5th century. The language that came to be thought of as Italian developed in central Tuscany and was first formalized in the early 14th century through the works of Tuscan writer Dante Alighieri , written in his native Florentine . Dante's epic poems, known collectively as the Commedia , to which another Tuscan poet Giovanni Boccaccio later affixed
6528-426: The auxiliary verb will or shall . For example: Every language discovered so far makes a some form of noun -verb distinction, possibly because of the graph-like nature of communicated meaning by humans, i.e. nouns being the "entities" and verbs being the "links" between them. In languages where the verb is inflected, it often agrees with its primary argument (the subject) in person, number or gender. With
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#17328521760236656-418: The "imperfect", which denotes uncompleted actions or states. In English grammar , the pluperfect (e.g. "had written") is now usually called the past perfect, since it combines past tense with perfect aspect . (The same term is sometimes used in relation to the grammar of other languages.) English also has a past perfect progressive (or past perfect continuous ) form: "had been writing". The pluperfect
6784-519: The 111 Italian lecturer sections belonging to foreign schools where Italian is taught as a language of culture. As of 2022, Australia had the highest number of students learning Italian in the world. This occurred because of support by the Italian community in Australia and the Italian Government and also because of successful educational reform efforts led by local governments in Australia. From
6912-458: The 13th century in the form of various religious texts and poetry. Although these are the first written records of Italian varieties separate from Latin, the spoken language had probably diverged long before the first written records appeared since those who were literate generally wrote in Latin even if they spoke other Romance varieties in person. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the use of Standard Italian became increasingly widespread and
7040-549: The 1970s. It is official both on the national level and on regional level in two cantons : Ticino and Grisons . In the latter canton, however, it is only spoken by a small minority, in the Italian Grisons . Ticino, which includes Lugano , the largest Italian-speaking city outside Italy, is the only canton where Italian is predominant. Italian is also used in administration and official documents in Vatican City . Italian
7168-417: The Italian dialects has declined in the modern era , as Italy unified under Standard Italian and continues to do so aided by mass media from newspapers to radio to television, diglossia is still frequently encountered in Italy and triglossia is not uncommon in emigrant communities among older speakers. Both situations normally involve some degree of code-switching and code-mixing . Notes: Italian has
7296-485: The Italian language into a lingua franca used not only among clerks, nobility, and functionaries in the Italian courts but also by the bourgeoisie . Italian literature's first modern novel, I promessi sposi ( The Betrothed ) by Alessandro Manzoni , further defined the standard by "rinsing" his Milanese "in the waters of the Arno " ( Florence 's river), as he states in the preface to his 1840 edition. After unification,
7424-550: The Mediterranean. The increasing political and cultural relevance of Florence during the periods of the rise of the Medici Bank , humanism , and the Renaissance made its dialect, or rather a refined version of it, a standard in the arts. The Renaissance era, known as il Rinascimento in Italian, was seen as a time of rebirth, which is the literal meaning of both renaissance (from French) and rinascimento (Italian). During this time, long-existing beliefs stemming from
7552-780: The action or state occurs through time. Important examples include: Aspect can either be lexical , in which case the aspect is embedded in the verb's meaning (as in "the sun shines", where "shines" is lexically stative), or it can be grammatically expressed, as in "I am running." Modality expresses the speaker's attitude toward the action or state given by the verb, especially with regard to degree of necessity, obligation, or permission ("You must go", "You should go", "You may go"), determination or willingness ("I will do this no matter what"), degree of probability ("It must be raining by now", "It may be raining", "It might be raining"), or ability ("I can speak French"). All languages can express modality with adverbs , but some also use verbal forms as in
7680-444: The auxiliaries avoir or être and adding the past participle, j'avais mangé . Another type of pluperfect ( passé antérieur , "past anterior") can be formed with the appropriate simple past form of the auxiliary: j'eus mangé , though it is rarely used now. In Italian , there are two pluperfects in the indicative mood: the recent pluperfect ( trapassato prossimo ) and the remote pluperfect ( trapassato remoto ). The recent pluperfect
7808-484: The auxiliary verb fost or the short version fo ' (= "was" in English or "war" in German) with the participle, which (quite difficult to explain) is stated in its feminine form. Examples: o fost foastă (or o fo' foastă ) = he had been; am fost văzută = I had seen; or fost venită = they had come. In Spanish , there are also two pluperfects, being the pluperfect proper ( pluscuamperfecto , or antecopretérito ) and
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#17328521760237936-519: The basic form, with or without the particle to , is the infinitive . In many languages , verbs are inflected (modified in form) to encode tense , aspect , mood , and voice . A verb may also agree with the person , gender or number of some of its arguments , such as its subject , or object . In English, three tenses exist: present , to indicate that an action is being carried out; past , to indicate that an action has been done; future , to indicate that an action will be done, expressed with
8064-444: The case of Northern Italian languages, however, scholars are careful not to overstate the effects of outsiders on the natural indigenous developments of the languages. The economic might and relatively advanced development of Tuscany at the time ( Late Middle Ages ) gave its language weight, although Venetian remained widespread in medieval Italian commercial life, and Ligurian (or Genoese) remained in use in maritime trade alongside
8192-630: The colonial period. In the early 19th century, Eritrea was the country with the highest number of Italians abroad, and the Italian Eritreans grew from 4,000 during World War I to nearly 100,000 at the beginning of World War II. In Asmara there are two Italian schools, the Italian School of Asmara (Italian primary school with a Montessori department) and the Liceo Sperimentale "G. Marconi" (Italian international senior high school). Italian
8320-563: The country (some 0.42% of the total population). Their numbers dropped dramatically after World War II following the Istrian–Dalmatian exodus , which caused the emigration of between 230,000 and 350,000 Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians. Italian was the official language of the Republic of Ragusa from 1492 to 1807. It formerly had official status in Albania due to the annexation of
8448-508: The country to the Kingdom of Italy (1939–1943). Albania has a large population of non-native speakers, with over half of the population having some knowledge of the Italian language. The Albanian government has pushed to make Italian a compulsory second language in schools. The Italian language is well-known and studied in Albania, due to its historical ties and geographical proximity to Italy and to
8576-446: The country. A few hundred Italian settlers returned to Libya in the 2000s. Italian was the official language of Eritrea during Italian colonisation . Italian is today used in commerce, and it is still spoken especially among elders; besides that, Italian words are incorporated as loan words in the main language spoken in the country (Tigrinya). The capital city of Eritrea, Asmara , still has several Italian schools, established during
8704-515: The country. The official census, carried out in 2002, reported 2,258 ethnic Italians ( Istrian Italians ) in Slovenia (0.11% of the total population). Italian language in Croatia is an official minority language in the country, with many schools and public announcements published in both languages. The 2001 census in Croatia reported 19,636 ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians ) in
8832-464: The design and fashion industries, in some sports such as football and especially in culinary terms. In Italy, almost all the other languages spoken as the vernacular —other than standard Italian and some languages spoken among immigrant communities—are often called " Italian dialects ", a label that can be very misleading if it is understood to mean "dialects of Italian". The Romance dialects of Italy are local evolutions of spoken Latin that pre-date
8960-414: The destination takes the active suffix -i (> mangai- ) in the intransitive form, and as a transitive verb the stem is not suffixed. The TAM ending -nu is the general today past attainative perfective, found with all numbers in the perfective except the singular active, where -ma is found. Depending on the language, verbs may express grammatical tense , aspect , or modality . Grammatical tense
9088-572: The diffusion of Italian television in the country. Due to heavy Italian influence during the Italian colonial period , Italian is still understood by some in former colonies such as Libya. Although it was the primary language in Libya since colonial rule , Italian greatly declined under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi , who expelled the Italian Libyan population and made Arabic the sole official language of
9216-589: The doubled perfect construction sometimes replaces the Standard German pluperfect construction. In France it is uncommon in the Northern regions (with Parisian influence) but it can be found widely in Provençal dialects as well as in other regions around the world. In all regions the doubled pluperfect ("I had had heard it") is uncommon although it is possible - all of these forms emphasize the perfect aspect by extending
9344-472: The educated gentlemen was to make the Grand Tour , visiting Italy to see its great historical monuments and works of art. It was expected that the visitor would learn at least some Italian, understood as language based on Florentine. In England, while the classical languages Latin and Greek were the first to be learned, Italian became the second most common modern language after French, a position it held until
9472-458: The establishment of Italian, and as such are sister languages to the Tuscan that was the historical source of Italian. They can be quite different from Italian and from each other, with some belonging to different linguistic branches of Romance. The only exceptions to this are twelve groups considered " historical language minorities ", which are officially recognized as distinct minority languages by
9600-587: The exception of the verb to be , English shows distinctive agreements only in the third person singular, present tense form of verbs, which are marked by adding "-s" ( walk s ) or "-es" ( fish es ). The rest of the persons are not distinguished in the verb ( I walk , you walk , they walk , etc.). Latin and the Romance languages inflect verbs for tense–aspect–mood (abbreviated 'TAM'), and they agree in person and number (but not in gender, as for example in Polish ) with
9728-433: The fact that it was linguistically an intermediate between the northern and the southern Italian dialects. Thus the dialect of Florence became the basis for what would become the official language of Italy. Italian was progressively made an official language of most of the Italian states predating unification, slowly replacing Latin, even when ruled by foreign powers (such as Spain in the Kingdom of Naples , or Austria in
9856-468: The free website and application Duolingo has 4.94 million English speakers learning the Italian language. According to the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs , every year there are more than 200,000 foreign students who study the Italian language; they are distributed among the 90 Institutes of Italian Culture that are located around the world, in the 179 Italian schools located abroad, or in
9984-405: The full lexical verb: Voordat ik er erg in had, was het al twaalf uur geworden . - Before I noticed, it had become noon already . In addition, pluperfect is sometimes used instead of present perfect: Dat had ik al gezien (voordat jij het zag) - lit.: I had seen that (before you did) . The parenthesized part is implied and, therefore, can be omitted. In English grammar , the pluperfect
10112-413: The given examples. If the verbal expression of modality involves the use of an auxiliary verb, that auxiliary is called a modal verb . If the verbal expression of modality involves inflection, we have the special case of mood ; moods include the indicative (as in "I am there"), the subjunctive (as in "I wish I were there"), and the imperative ("Be there!"). The voice of a verb expresses whether
10240-483: The island of Corsica (but not in the neighbouring Sardinia , which on the contrary underwent Italianization well into the late 18th century, under Savoyard sway: the island's linguistic composition, roofed by the prestige of Spanish among the Sardinians , would therein make for a rather slow process of assimilation to the Italian cultural sphere ). The rediscovery of Dante's De vulgari eloquentia , as well as
10368-563: The language has a 7-vowel sound system ('e' and 'o' have mid-low and mid-high sounds). Italian has contrast between short and long consonants and gemination (doubling) of consonants. During the Middle Ages , the established written language in Europe was Latin, although the great majority of people were illiterate, and only few were well versed in the language. In the Italian Peninsula , as in most of Europe, most would instead speak
10496-631: The language to that continent. According to some sources, Italian is the second most spoken language in Argentina after the official language of Spanish, although its number of speakers, mainly of the older generation, is decreasing. Italian bilingual speakers can be found scattered across the Southeast of Brazil as well as in the South. In Venezuela , Italian is the most spoken language after Spanish and Portuguese, with around 200,000 speakers. In Uruguay , people who speak Italian as their home language are 1.1% of
10624-491: The late 18th century when it tended to be replaced by German. John Milton , for instance, wrote some of his early poetry in Italian. Within the Catholic Church , Italian is known by a large part of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and is used in substitution for Latin in some official documents. Italian loanwords continue to be used in most languages in matters of art and music (especially classical music including opera), in
10752-525: The late 19th to the mid-20th century, millions of Italians settled in Argentina, Uruguay, Southern Brazil and Venezuela, as well as in Canada and the United States, where they formed a physical and cultural presence. In some cases, colonies were established where variants of regional languages of Italy were used, and some continue to use this regional language. Examples are Rio Grande do Sul , Brazil, where Talian
10880-474: The latter is actually past conditional, rarely used in modern Polish. In Serbo-Croatian , the pluperfect ("pluskvamperfekt") is constructed with the past tense ("perfekt") of the verb to be ("biti") plus the adjective form of the main verb. Alternatively, it can be formed by using the imperfect ("imperfekt") of "biti" with the past participle of the main verb. For example: "Ja sam bio učio" (or: "Ja bijah učio"), which means, "I had been studying". In Bulgarian ,
11008-514: The law. On the other hand, Corsican (a language spoken on the French island of Corsica ) is closely related to medieval Tuscan , from which Standard Italian derives and evolved. The differences in the evolution of Latin in the different regions of Italy can be attributed to the natural changes that all languages in regular use are subject to, and to some extent to the presence of three other types of languages: substrata, superstrata, and adstrata . The most prevalent were substrata (the language of
11136-425: The modal verb in the preterite or the auxiliary ( haben for all modals): There is a drastic shift of meaning between these variants: the first sentences denote that it "had been necessary" to rain in the past. The second sentence denotes that the speaker assumed that it had rained. In standard Swedish , the pluperfect ( pluskvamperfekt ) is similar to the pluperfect in a number of other Germanic languages, but with
11264-404: The modal verb so that a doubled pluperfect would add upon the pluperfect in another part of the speech. Verb A verb (from Latin verbum 'word') is part of speech that in syntax generally conveys an action ( bring , read , walk , run , learn ), an occurrence ( happen , become ), or a state of being ( be , exist , stand ). In the usual description of English ,
11392-403: The movie'. The verb văzuse is in the pluperfect form of a vedea 'to see'. Technically, this form is obtained from the singular third person form of the simple perfect tense by adding specific terminations for each person and number. However, in northern Transylvania there is a regional way to state the pluperfect (that may reflect the German influence). The pluperfect is expressed by combining
11520-412: The nation was unified in 1861. Italian is a Romance language , a descendant of Vulgar Latin (colloquial spoken Latin). Standard Italian is based on Tuscan , especially its Florentine dialect , and is, therefore, an Italo-Dalmatian language , a classification that includes most other central and southern Italian languages and the extinct Dalmatian . According to Ethnologue , lexical similarity
11648-525: The norm. In the objective, the verb takes an object but no subject; the nonreferent subject in some uses may be marked in the verb by an incorporated dummy pronoun similar to that used with the English weather verbs. Impersonal verbs in null subject languages take neither subject nor object, as is true of other verbs, but again the verb may show incorporated dummy pronouns despite the lack of subject and object phrases. Verbs are often flexible with regard to valency. In non-valency marking languages such as English,
11776-408: The number of printing presses in Italy grew rapidly and by the year 1500 reached a total of 56, the biggest number of printing presses in all of Europe. This enabled the production of more pieces of literature at a lower cost and Italian, as the dominant language, spread. Italian became the language used in the courts of every state in the Italian Peninsula , as well as the prestige variety used on
11904-630: The openness of vowels, the length of the consonants, and influence of the local language (for example, in informal situations andà , annà and nare replace the standard Italian andare in the area of Tuscany, Rome and Venice respectively for the infinitive "to go"). There is no definitive date when the various Italian variants of Latin—including varieties that contributed to modern Standard Italian—began to be distinct enough from Latin to be considered separate languages. One criterion for determining that two language variants are to be considered separate languages rather than variants of
12032-584: The original inhabitants), as the Italian dialects were most probably simply Latin as spoken by native cultural groups. Superstrata and adstrata were both less important. Foreign conquerors of Italy that dominated different regions at different times left behind little to no influence on the dialects. Foreign cultures with which Italy engaged in peaceful relations with, such as trade, had no significant influence either. Throughout Italy, regional varieties of Standard Italian, called Regional Italian , are spoken. Regional differences can be recognized by various factors:
12160-453: The other hand, almost everyone still speaks the Corsican idiom , which, due to its linguistic proximity to the Italian standard language, appears both linguistically as an Italian dialect and therefore as a carrier of Italian culture, despite the French government's decades-long efforts to cut Corsica off from the Italian motherland. Italian was the official language in Monaco until 1860, when it
12288-454: The past (as in I was sleepy because I'd been working all night. ). The past perfect form also has some uses in which it does not directly refer to an actual past event. These are generally in condition clauses and some other dependent clauses referring to hypothetical circumstances (as in "If I'd known about that, I wouldn't have asked."), as well as certain expressions of wish (as in "I wish I hadn't been so stupid back then."). In German ,
12416-475: The past participle. For example, Kuando yegí suve ke mi haver tuve morido or Kuando yegí suve ke mi haver avía morido . In Portuguese and Galician , a synthetic pluperfect ( mais-que-perfeito or antepretérito ) has been conserved from Latin. For example, Quando cheguei, soube que o meu amigo morrera , 'When I came, I found out that my friend had died'. In Portuguese, however, its use has become mostly literary, and particularly in spoken communication,
12544-474: The past time, would entail the use of the simple past , I did it , rather than the present perfect). However, there is no such objection to a sentence like I had done it last Friday , where the past perfect is accompanied by a specification of the time of occurrence, especially in a context that clearly provides for a connection with another past event, either specified (as in I hadn't met him then. ) or implied (as in I hadn't expected that. ). English also has
12672-442: The past. Some languages, like Latin , make pluperfects purely by inflecting the verb, whereas most modern European languages do so using appropriate auxiliary verbs in combination with past participles . Ancient Greek verbs had a pluperfect form (called ὑπερσυντέλικος , "more than completed"). An example is ἐτεθύκει , "had sacrificed" – compare the perfect τέθυκε , "has sacrificed". Modern Greek uses auxiliaries to form
12800-442: The pluperfect ( минало предварително време ) is formed with the imperfect tense of the auxiliary verb съм (to be) and the perfect active participle of the main verb. In Welsh , the pluperfect is formed without an auxiliary verb, usually by interpolating -as- before the simple past ending: parhasem , "we had remained". In Irish , perfect forms are constructed using the idea of being (or having been) after doing something. In
12928-482: The pluperfect ( Plusquamperfekt , Präteritumperfekt , or Vorvergangenheit , lit. pre-past ) is used in much the same manner, normally in a nachdem sentence. The Plusquamperfekt is formed with the Partizip Perfekt ( Partizip II) of the full lexical verb, plus the auxiliary verb haben or sein in its preterite form, depending on the full lexical verb in question. When using modal verbs, one can use either
13056-484: The pluperfect ( predpreteklik , 'before the past') is formed with the verb 'to be' ( biti ) in past tense and the participle of the main verb. It is used to denote a completed action in the past before another action ( Pred nekaj leti so bile vode poplavile vsa nabrežja Savinje , 'A few years ago, all the banks of Savinja River had been flooded) or, with a modal verb , a past event that should have happened ( Moral bi ti bil povedati , 'I should have told you'). Its use
13184-579: The pluperfect as an absolute-relative tense , because it absolutely (not by context) establishes a deixis (the past event) and places the action relative to the deixis (before it). Examples of the English pluperfect (past perfect) are found in the following sentence (from Viktor Frankl 's Man's Search for Meaning ): A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering had no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and more intensely. Here, "had thought" and "had reached" are examples of
13312-399: The pluperfect is usually formed using the auxiliary verb ter , in the imperfect form (tinha tinhas tinha tínhamos tínheis tinham) plus the past participle. For example, Quando cheguei, soube que o meu amigo tinha morrido . A more formal way of expressing the pluperfect uses the verb "haver". For example: Quando cheguei, soube que o meu amigo havia morrido . This periphrastic construction
13440-556: The pluperfect, bhíomar tar éis imeacht , "we had gone", literally, "we were after going". In Finnish , the pluperfect ( pluskvamperfekti ) is constructed with an auxiliary verb olla 'to be', which is in the past tense. The primary verbs get the past participle endings -nyt/-nut in singular, -neet in plural forms (the 'n' assimilates with certain consonants) and -ttu/-tty/-tu/-ty in passive forms. میں نے سنا تھا تم نے سنا تھا اس نے سنا تھا ہم نے سنا تھا آپ نے سنا تھا انہوں نے سنا تھا In German and French there
13568-411: The pluperfect. They refer to an event (a man thinking he has reached the limit of his capacity to suffer), which takes place before another event (the man finding that his capacity to suffer has no limit), that is itself a past event, referred to using the past tense ( found ). The pluperfect is needed to make it clear that the first event (the thinking and the supposed reaching) is placed even earlier in
13696-481: The pluperfect; examples are given in the table at the end of this article. In Latin , the pluperfect ( plus quam perfectum ) is formed without an auxiliary verb in the active voice , and with an auxiliary verb plus the perfect passive participle in the passive voice . For example, in the indicative mood : The subjunctive mood is formed similarly (in this case dedisset and data esset respectively). In many cases an ablative absolute phrase, consisting of
13824-406: The population of Italy could speak Standard Italian. He reports that in 1951 that percentage had risen to 87%. The ability to speak Italian did not necessarily mean it was in everyday use, and most people (63.5%) still usually spoke their native dialects. In addition, other factors such as mass emigration, industrialization, and urbanization, and internal migrations after World War II , contributed to
13952-469: The proliferation of Standard Italian. The Italians who emigrated during the Italian diaspora beginning in 1861 were often of the uneducated lower class, and thus the emigration had the effect of increasing the percentage of literates, who often knew and understood the importance of Standard Italian, back home in Italy. A large percentage of those who had emigrated also eventually returned to Italy, often more educated than when they had left. Although use of
14080-528: The pronunciation of stressed "e", and of "s" between vowels in many words: e.g. va bene "all right" is pronounced [vabˈbɛːne] by a Roman (and by any standard Italian speaker), [vaˈbeːne] by a Milanese (and by any speaker whose native dialect lies to the north of the La Spezia–Rimini Line ); a casa "at home" is [akˈkaːsa] for Roman, [akˈkaːsa] or [akˈkaːza] for standard, [aˈkaːza] for Milanese and generally northern. In contrast to
14208-415: The publication of Agnolo Monosini 's Latin tome Floris italicae linguae libri novem in 1604 followed by the first Italian dictionary in 1612. An important event that helped the diffusion of Italian was the conquest and occupation of Italy by Napoleon in the early 19th century (who was himself of Italian-Corsican descent). This conquest propelled the unification of Italy some decades after and pushed
14336-479: The referendum that allowed France to annex Savoy and Nice, and a group of his followers (among the Italian Savoyards ) took refuge in Italy in the following years. Corsica passed from the Republic of Genoa to France in 1769 after the Treaty of Versailles . Italian was the official language of Corsica until 1859. Giuseppe Garibaldi called for the inclusion of the " Corsican Italians " within Italy when Rome
14464-529: The secondary object if present, a greater degree of head-marking than is found in most European languages. Verbs vary by type, and each type is determined by the kinds of words that accompany it and the relationship those words have with the verb itself. Classified by the number of their valency arguments, usually four basic types are distinguished: intransitives, transitives, ditransitives and double transitive verbs. Some verbs have special grammatical uses and hence complements, such as copular verbs (i.e., be );
14592-460: The so called pretérito anterior (or antepretérito ). While the former uses the imperfect of the auxiliary verb haber plus the past participle, the latter is formed with the simple past of haber plus the past participle. For example, in pluperfect Había comido cuando mi madre vino 'I had eaten when my mother came', but in pretérito anterior Hube comido cuando mi madre vino 'I had eaten when my mother would come'. This last form however
14720-557: The subject of the verb is performing the action of the verb or whether the action is being performed on the subject. The two most common voices are the active voice (as in "I saw the car") and the passive voice (as in "The car was seen by me" or simply "The car was seen"). Most languages have a number of verbal nouns that describe the action of the verb. In the Indo-European languages, verbal adjectives are generally called participles . English has an active participle, also called
14848-411: The subject. Japanese , like many languages with SOV word order, inflects verbs for tense-aspect-mood, as well as other categories such as negation, but shows absolutely no agreement with the subject—it is a strictly dependent-marking language . On the other hand, Basque , Georgian , and some other languages, have polypersonal agreement : the verb agrees with the subject, the direct object, and even
14976-464: The teachings of the Roman Catholic Church began to be understood from new perspectives as humanists —individuals who placed emphasis on the human body and its full potential—began to shift focus from the church to human beings themselves. The continual advancements in technology play a crucial role in the diffusion of languages. After the invention of the printing press in the 15th century,
15104-463: The title Divina , were read throughout the peninsula and his written dialect became the "canonical standard" that all educated Italians could understand. Dante is still credited with standardizing the Italian language. In addition to the widespread exposure gained through literature, the Florentine dialect also gained prestige due to the political and cultural significance of Florence at the time and
15232-529: The total population of the country. In Australia, Italian is the second most spoken foreign language after Chinese, with 1.4% of the population speaking it as their home language. The main Italian-language newspapers published outside Italy are the L'Osservatore Romano ( Vatican City ), the L'Informazione di San Marino ( San Marino ), the Corriere del Ticino and the laRegione Ticino ( Switzerland ),
15360-459: The verb do used for do -support in questioning and negation; and tense or aspect auxiliaries, e.g., be , have or can . In addition, verbs can be non-finite (not inflected for person, number, tense, etc.), such special forms as infinitives , participles or gerunds . An intransitive verb is one that does not have a direct object. Intransitive verbs may be followed by an adverb (a word that addresses how, where, when, and how often) or end
15488-506: The verb llueve means "It rains". In English, French and German, they require a dummy pronoun and therefore formally have a valency of 1. As verbs in Spanish incorporate the subject as a TAM suffix, Spanish is not actually a null-subject language, unlike Mandarin (see above). Such verbs in Spanish also have a valency of 1. Intransitive and transitive verbs are the most common, but the impersonal and objective verbs are somewhat different from
15616-724: The verb has a different valency. Some verbs in English have historically derived forms that show change of valency in some causative verbs, such as fall-fell-fallen : fell-felled-felled ; rise-rose-risen : raise-raised-raised ; cost-cost-cost : cost-costed-costed . In valency marking languages, valency change is shown by inflecting the verb in order to change the valency. In Kalaw Lagaw Ya of Australia, for example, verbs distinguish valency by argument agreement suffixes and TAM endings: Verb structure: manga-i-[number]-TAM "arrive+active+singular/dual/plural+TAM" Verb structure: manga-Ø-[number]-TAM "arrive+attainative+singular/dual/plural+TAM" The verb stem manga- 'to take/come/arrive' at
15744-637: The working languages of the Council of Europe . It is the third-most-widely spoken native language in the European Union (13% of the EU population) and it is spoken as a second language by 13.4 million EU citizens (3%). Including Italian speakers in non-EU European countries (such as Switzerland, Albania and the United Kingdom ) and on other continents, the total number of speakers is approximately 85 million. Italian
15872-440: Was a writing tutor." "The singers were very nervous." "His mother looked worried." "Josh remained a reliable friend." These verbs precede nouns or adjectives in a sentence, which become predicate nouns and predicate adjectives. Copulae are thought to 'link' the predicate adjective or noun to the subject. They can also be followed by an adverb of place, which is sometimes referred to as a predicate adverb. For example: "My house
16000-548: Was also introduced to Somalia through colonialism and was the sole official language of administration and education during the colonial period but fell out of use after government, educational and economic infrastructure were destroyed in the Somali Civil War . Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia. Although over 17 million Americans are of Italian descent , only
16128-516: Was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy , but King Victor Emmanuel II did not agree to it. Italian is generally understood in Corsica by the population resident therein who speak Corsican , which is an Italo-Romance idiom similar to Tuscan. Francization occurred in Nice case, and caused a near-disappearance of the Italian language as many of the Italian speakers in these areas migrated to Italy. In Corsica, on
16256-443: Was mirrored by a decline in the use of the dialects. An increase in literacy was one of the main driving factors (one can assume that only literates were capable of learning Standard Italian, whereas those who were illiterate had access only to their native dialect). The percentage of literates rose from 25% in 1861 to 60% in 1911, and then on to 78.1% in 1951. Tullio De Mauro , an Italian linguist, has asserted that in 1861 only 2.5% of
16384-630: Was replaced by the French. This was due to the annexation of the surrounding County of Nice to France following the Treaty of Turin (1860) . It formerly had official status in Montenegro (because of the Venetian Albania ), parts of Slovenia and Croatia (because of the Venetian Istria and Venetian Dalmatia ), parts of Greece (because of the Venetian rule in the Ionian Islands and by
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