I Dialetti Italiani

The term dialect is defined by the Collins dictionary as “a form of a language spoken in a particular geographical area or by members of a particular social class or occupational group, distinguished by its vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation”.
On the subject of Italy, is one of the countries in which the way of speaking changes depending on the region.
The current dialects of Italy havetheir origins in a spoken form of Latin (popular Latin), in use during the Roman Empire.
The political instability that continued to the Roman’s rules remained in Italy until the reunification as a nation in the nineteenth century.
This long period of fragmentation and the fact that Classical Latin was preferred as international language of study allowed several spoken forms were developed untilthey could be recognized as different languages.
With the political reunification of the Peninsula and the amount of travels and removals that began to take place, the need for a national language became more urgent.
Nowadays, thanks to education programs, literary language is used in all regions of the country for the law, the business and the education. The dialects have been to the household orbetween close neighbours in urbanized neighbourhoods and villages.

There are two main groups of Italian dialects, expecting the Sardinian group, which is considered as another language entirely. Sardinian is a distinct branch of the Romance language family, and not an Italian dialect. The language has been influenced by Catalan, Spanish and indigenous Nuragic elements with some roots fromPhoenician and Etruscan. While it has been significantly supplanted by Italian for official purposes, in 2006 the regional administration has approved the use of Limba Sarda Comuna in official documents. As a literary language, it is gaining importance, despite heated debate about the lack of standard orthography and controversial proposed solutions to this problem. The two most widely spoken forms ofthe Sardinian language are Campidanese (Sardu Campidanesu), spoken throughout the southern half of the island, and Logudorese (Sardu Logudoresu), from the northern-central region, extending almost to the suburbs of Sassari.
The other two groups are separated by the Spezia-Rimini line, named for two towns trough which it passes. This line runs from east to west across the peninsula, mostly alongthe border between Tuscany and Emilia Romagna.
In this way dialects are divided into northern dialects and southern center dialects.
Northern dialects are divided into two important groups: the largest geographically is the Gallo- Italian group, which includes the regions of Liguria, Piedmont, Lombardy and Emilia Romagna, as well as parts of Trentino-Alto Adige. It has been named by the Gaulsand who it seems they left traces of their Celtic language in the modern dialects. The following group in amplitude is the Venetian group, whose limits are the same of the Veneto region.
The southern central dialects are divided in four different groups. The Tuscan group occupies and area that roughly covers the region of Tuscany. To the south are the dialects of Latium-Umbria-Marche, occupyingthe northern half of Latium (including Rome), the most part of Umbria and the Marches. These two groups are also known as the Central dialects.
Directly below them are the southern dialects with two main types. The southern intermediate which occupies the bottom half of the peninsula, including the southern regions of Lazio, Abruzzi, Molise, Campania, Basilicata and Puglia parts. The types ofCalabria, Puglia and Sicily are known as extreme southern group.
In Italy there are also two other Romance languages. Ladino is spoken in the northeast corner of Italy, although there is a different type in Friuli, and another in Dolomites. The Cerdeño is spoken in the island of Sardinia divided into two dialects.
Italian dialects are also spoken outside Italy. The Istrian dialects are restricted...