Italian Dialects

Italian Dialects

Dialects of Italian (not to be confused with the Languages of Italy) are regional varieties of the Italian language, more commonly and more accurately referred to as Regional Italian. The dialects have features, most notably phonological and lexical, percolating from the underlying substrate languages. Tuscan and Central Italian are in some respects not distant from Italian in their linguistic features, due to Italian's history as derived from a somewhat polished form of Florentine. Nevertheless, the traditional speech of Tuscany is rightly viewed as part of the collection of dialects of Italy. Several of the "dialects of Italy" should be considered distinct languages in their own right, and are assigned to separate branches on the Romance language family tree by Ethnologue and other academic works.