Italian belongs to Romance brace of Indo-European languages and is a direct descendant
of spoken (Vulgar) Latin together with French, Romanian, Portuguese and Spanish.

The first sample of written Italian dates back at the end of the tenth century. However, it
was only four centuries later that Italian language was formalized and a standard
language began to take shape under the influence and direction of Dante Alighieri.

There are almost seventy million people speaking Italian nowadays. Most of them live in Italy, San Marino, Vatican and Switzerland but there is also a numerous community of speakers of Italian in the United States of America and South America, Croatia, Malta and Slovenia.

Italian is famous for its countless, colourful dialects. Some linguists may even go as far as to state that there is a different language spoken in each Italian city. The Tuscan dialect, together with Umbrian, Romanesco and Laziale, is the closest to standard Italian as opposed to Neapolitan and Sicilian which are almost non-mutually intelligible with Italian.

The Italian alphabet is of Latin origin and consists of twenty-one main letters to which we could add five more (j, k, w, x and y) that are used only in foreign names.
Much of the vocabulary of this language is derived from Latin but Italian manages to stay fresh by borrowing words from English, French, and German. On the other hand, many Italian words have become part of foreign vocabularies, mainly names of foods, musical terms and art related words.

Italian grammar is also Latin based and therefore shares its main features with the other Romance languages: nouns are marked for gender and number, adjectives agree with nouns, verbs are marked for person and number and agree with the subject and the word order is in most cases Subject-Verb-Object etc.

Italian is rather easy to learn for a person speaking a Romance language. However, Italian seems to be more popular among the speakers of English and other Germanic languages who tend to take up Italian courses (mostly after they visited the country, or at least learned about its unique culture, one of the most impressive representations of human talent, starting from ancient times and offering outstanding models in sculpture, painting, music, literature, etc.).

Ioana Mihailas works for Lingo24 legal translations services UK, a top document translation agency.