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Italian pages
Introduction · Articles · Adpositions · Pronouns

Italic Languages
Latino-Faliscan	Faliscan
	Latin	Italo-Dalmatian	Corsican, Dalmatian, Istriot, Italian, Neapolitan, Sicilian
		Eastern Romance	Moldovan, Romanian
		Southern Romance	Sardian,
		Western Romance	Pyrenean-Mozarabic	Aragonese, Mozarabic
			Gallo-Iberian	Langues d'oïl	French
				Occitano-Romance
				Gallo-Italian
			Ibero-Romance	West Iberian	Galician, Leonese, Spanish, Portuguese
				East Iberian	Catalan
			Rhaeto-Romance	Friulian, Ladin, Romansh
			Oscan	Sabine, South Picene, Oscan
			Umbrian	Aequian, Marsian, Umbrian, Volscian
Vestinian	Vestinian

Welcome to the Wikilang introduction page for the Italian language, or as we call it, italiano!

An Introduction to the Language

Italian is spoken by some 70 million natives and 125 million second language speakers. It was originally based on the Tuscan language, with change made based on other regional languages. Throughout the world, Italian is the fifth most taught non-native language, after English, French, Spanish, and German. Italian is also the closest national language to Latin. It has high lexical similarity with other Romance languages: 89% with French, 87% with Catalan, 85% with Sardinian, 82% with Spanish, 78% with Ladin and 77% with Romanian.

Family

Indo-European

• Italic
  • Romance
    • Italo-Western
      • Italo-Dalmatian
        • Italian

Spoken in

Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, Malta, Slovenia, Croatia, Eritrea, Somalia, Greece and elsewhere, with a total of about 195 million speakers.