what language was spoken in italy before italian
Italian language During the Middle Ages, the established written language in Europe was Latin. With the great majority of people being illiterate, however, only a handful were well versed in the language. In the Italian peninsula, as in most of Europe, the majority would instead speak a local vernacular. These dialects (as they are commonly referred to as) were born to Vulgar Latin over the course of centuries, evolving naturally unaffected by formal standards and teachings, and are not truly "dialects" of Standard Italian, that itself started off being one of these local tongues. Since they often provide poor mutual intelligibility with standard Italian, they are better classified as distinct languages.[22]:13
History of Italy The name Italia was in origin applied only to a portion of what is now Calabria, possibly from an Oscan name Víteliú, interpreted as "[land] of young cattle". It was not applied to the entire peninsula (now under Roman rule) until the 1st century BCE.[9]
Languages of the Roman Empire Koine Greek had become a shared language around the eastern Mediterranean and into Asia Minor as a consequence of the conquests of Alexander the Great.[6] The
Italian language Italian is a Romance language, and is therefore a descendant of Vulgar Latin (the spoken form of non-classical Latin).[note 1] Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, especially its Florentine dialect, and is therefore an Italo-Dalmatian language, to which Sicilian and the extinct Dalmatian also belong, among a few others.