Hi! My name is Josh, and a little backround on me is that I am the language guy. I love them, and I have had the wonderful opportunity to learn Italian and Spanish and plan to learn more in the future! What I am writing about today is something that isn't recognized apon by many teens. I say this because every American teen has many different interests and subjects in school, and languages aren't usually a big interest to a teenager. But languages are really cool.


Maybe you take Spanish in school. Or maybe French or German. What do I know you may even take Italian. In my opinion, Italian is such a cool language. If you aren't familiar with it, look up an Italian video of someone speaking Italian. Languages may bore you, and that is okay because they are interesting for some as they aren't for others. But let's get right to the point.


Italy is a very beautiful country. I'm sure you can all agree with me on that. There is a different mix of modern and ancient which makes Italy different from alot of other countries, such as most of America. Italy originated as part of the Roman Empire, after that, Italy and other areas near it were all broken up, no government, no structure, and it was basically a mess. This was called the Middle Ages, ever heard of it? Terrible time for those living in it. But anyway, after the Middle Ages, something occured. Many city-states formed, similar to how Greece was many years before. This means that Italy was an area with many seperate countries, if you will, and were all seperately executing tasks with their own government and ways of living, although somewhat in a similar manner because of their geographic location near eachother. Anyway, by this happening, each "country" developed their own language called a dialect. The way that language changes, because it is always changing, is that it will continue to change as a whole if there is one large community. But, if that community is split by a boundary, and the two sides have rare or uncommon communication, the language will still change but each side will change differently, and not the same because there is no longer much communication through them. You may think that this doesn't matter because were talking about the Italian language, not other languages; but thats just it. Italy isn't just made up of one language. This will make more sense in a minute, but lets go back to the city-states. So these languages that they developed were all derived from Latin, which was the official language of the Roman Empire; but something cool is that they also derived from other languages through trade influence of the area they are a part of. This went on for a while, and then through a long proscess thus becoming the country of Italy. When this unification took place, each former city state was troubled with how they were all to communicate with each other, but it was finally chosen that the modern Italian language was to be based on the Florentine dialect of Tuscany. This was chosen so that all could speak and understand each other.


So what happened to the other languages? They are still spoken widely. And the cool thing is that each city and region of Italy has their own which makes it so cool to visit and learn the culture. Most dialects have similar words because of their area, but northern and southern dialects are almost alienated and the capability to understand one another is low. Another cool thing is that most Italians can swich back and forth from standard Italian to their dialect, because they grow up with both.


If you want to learn more about Italians and their dialects, look it up! I encourage that you learn Italian too, it would be an awesome experience to communicate with others!