How Much Do You Know About Italian?

The Romance family also includes French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian, among others.

Descended from Vulgar Latin, the first evidence of written Italian comes from the 10th century, though it wasn't until the 14th century that it started becoming standardized.

Written in the 14th century, Dante's Divine Comedy helped standardize the Italian language by creating grammar and spelling norms.

Italy was unified in 1871, and a dialect called Tuscan was chosen to be the official language of the country. It eventually became known as "Italian," though at the time it was chosen, less than 5% of people in the country could speak it.

This book, called in English The Betrothed, is the most widely read Italian novel ever written. It isn't well known abroad, but is part of pretty much every curriculum in Italy.

There are disagreements over the exact numbers, but one reliable estimate says Italian has 63 million native speakers, and an additional 3 million people speak it as a second language.

Italy, San Marino, Vatican City and Switzerland all have Italian as an official language.

High concentrations of Italian immigrants settled in these states in the past.

Argentina has 1.5 million Italian speakers, making it the second most-spoken language there (after Spanish).

If you've ever played an instrument, you might remember Italian words including "Forte" and "Staccato" used in sheet music.