View Chapters

Book: The Five-Minute Linguist

Chapter: Who speaks Italian?

DOI: 10.1558/equinox.20812

Blurb:

The earliest example of written Italian appears in a legal document from 960 AD. Somewhere around the end of the first millennium, Latin was changing into what we now think of as Italian. Approximately 57 million of the country’s 60 million inhabitants communicate in the standard language, as do millions of Italian speakers in other countries such as Argentina or Switzerland.

Chapter Contributors