language: History of Italian

Italian is a romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from Vulgar Latin of the Roman empire. It is an official language in Italy, Switzerland, San Marino. It has an official minority in western Istria. It formerly had official status in Albania, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, Greece. It is used to be an official language in the former colonial areas of Italian East Africa and Italian North Africa. In America and Australia Italian is also spoken by large expatriate communities and immigrant. Italian is included under the languages covered by the European charter for regional or minority languages in Bosnia and Romania. Italian is major European language, being one of the official languages of the organization for Co operation and security in Europe and in the council of Europe one of the working languages. It is the second most widely spoken native language in the European union with 67 million speakers. During the middle ages, the established written language in European was Italian, though the great majority were illiterate and only a handful were well versed. The romance languages of Italy can differ greatly from Italian at all levels and are classified typologically as distinct languages. The standard Italian language has a poetic and literacy origin in the writings of Tuscan and Sicilian writers of the 12^th century and even though the grammar and core lexicon are basically unchanged from those used in Florence in the 13^th century. The language that came to be thought of as Italian developed in central Tuscany and was first formalized in the early 14^th century through the works of Tuscan writer Dante Alighieri, written in his native Florentine.