Top 10 greetings in Italian for Beginners
Italian is a Romance language, a descendant of Vulgar Latin (colloquial spoken Latin). Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, especially its Florentine dialect, and is, therefore, an Italo-Dalmatian language, a classification that includes most other central and southern Italian languages and the extinct Dalmatian. Italian is spoken chiefly in Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, Slovenia and Croatia. In Switzerland, it is spoken in Graubünden and Ticino cantons in the south-east. In Croatia, it is spoken mainly in Istria County in the northwest, and it is spoken in the neighbouring Istria region of southwest Slovenia. Italian speakers are also known in other countries, including Malta, Monaco, Romania, France, Eritrea, Somalia, Brazil Australia and the USA.
There are about 64 million native speakers of Italian worldwide, another 3 million people speak it as a second language. Italian first started to appear in written documents during the 10th century in the form of notes and short texts inserted into Latin documents such as lawsuits and poetry. For a long time, there was no standard written or spoken language in Italy and writers tended to write in their own regional dialects and languages.
The first grammar of Italian with the Latin title Regule lingue florentine (Rules of the Florentine language) was produced by Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) and published in 1495.
During the 15th and 16th centuries, both Latin and Italian were used for technical and scientific texts. The Italian used was full of Latin words and over time Latin was used less and less as Italian became increasingly popular.
Today the Tuscan dialect is known as Italian (Italiano) and is the official language of Italy. It is the main language of literature and the media.
Italian has an informal tense which is used when speaking with good friends, young people, children, and your family members. Basically, anyone, you know well.
However, when speaking to a person you don’t know well such as a superior, shopkeeper, waiter, teacher, professor, or someone of important social standing such as a doctor, or police officer, then you should address him or her in the formal tense.
When you become more familiar with someone, you may change from using the formal tense to the informal tense. According to custom, the elder person initiates this change. It’s handy to learn both tenses even if you don’t use the informal very much. Whenever in doubt, the safe option is to use the formal tense.
