Italian language facts

• Modern Italian developed in the 13th ad 14th century out of Latin and numerous local dialects.
  
  
• In that time Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch revolutionized literature. They all lived in Florence or Tuscany and turned the Florentine dialect into the standard variety.
  
  
• Many terms from art history and music theory are Italian. It is the perfect language to discover European history.

Some characteristics of Italian language

• Italian is pronounced phonetically!
  Every letter corresponds to a distinguishable sound, there are hardly any differences between pronunciation and spelling. However, pronunciation can vary considerably from region to region.
  
  
• Formal / informal address
  Deference and politeness is expressed by the switch between formal 'lei' and informal 'tu'.
  
  
• Italian shares an approximate 85% lexical similarity to Spanish and French.
  
  
• Italian has a highly musical quality as almost all words end in a vowel.
  
  
• Inflection, declination and grammatical gender are important features of Italian grammar
  
  
• Vowels can feature diacritic marks: à, è, ì, ò, and ù.