These short texts gives you some preliminary information about italian. Read and compare it with your answers in the previous test.

1. Italian belongs to the group of Romance languages.

Italian is an Indo-European language that belongs to the group of Romance languages, also called Neo-Latin languages due to their common origin from Vulgar Latin. Today the six most widely spoken Romance languages are, in decreasing order, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan. Among these, Spanish is usually considered the most understandable for Italian people.

2. Italian is spoken by over 80 million people.

Italian is spoken as a mother tongue by approximately 65 million people in the EU (mainly in Italy), and as a second language by about 14 million people. Including the Italian speakers in non-EU European countries (such as Switzerland and Albania) and in other continents, the total number of speakers is more than 85 million.

3. Italian is written in the Latin alphabet.

The Italian alphabet derives from the writing system used in ancient Rome, with minor changes concerning, for instance, the introduction of some missing characters.

4. Italian has articles.

Similarly to English, Italian uses both definite and indefinite articles.

5. Italian doesn’t have cases.

Italian is a highly inflected language, but it did not preserve the case system of Latin. Some of the functions which in Latin were performed by cases are expressed in Italian by means of prepositions, just like in English.

6. Italian has two genders.

The Italian gender system is quite simple, as it consists of two categories: masculine and feminine. Dealing with Italian nouns (or pronouns, or adjectives), however, is made a little trickier by the fact that word endings convey information about both gender and number at the same time.

7. In Italian there are more than 3 different tenses.

The Italian language has plenty of tenses! Grammars list four simple tenses and four compound tenses in the indicative mood. Simple tenses are verb forms that consist of one word only; these are the present tense (presente), the imperfect tense (imperfetto), the remote past tense (passato remoto), and the future tense (futuro semplice). In addition, there are four compound tenses (tempi composti), which are verb forms consisting of two words. Both the verbs essere ‘to be’ and avere ‘to have’ act as helping verbs in compound tense formations, which are the present perfect (passato prossimo), the future perfect (futuro anteriore), the pluperfect (trapassato prossimo), and the past anterior (trapassato remoto).

8. In Italian the sentence word order is similar to English.

In Italian sentences the basic word order is SVO (Subject Verb Object), but you can ‘scramble’ words for expressive aims (i.e. to emphasise one word or another in a sentence) and, differently from English, you can drop the subject when the context is clear enough.

9. In Italian the accent falls generally on the penultimate syllable.

In Italian the stress tends to falls on the penultimate (second-to-last) syllable, but some attention is in any case required, especially when dealing with words written in the same way (e.g. ancóra ‘again’ vs. áncora ‘anchor’), or when conjugating verbs (e.g. párlo ‘I speak’, but párlano ‘they speak’).

10. In Italy dialects are very different from one another.

In Italy there are many and diverse regional dialects; several, like Sardinian and Friulan, are considered as distinct languages in their own right. While dialects used in central regions (Tuscany in particular) are deemed to be more akin to standard Italian, dialects spoken in northern regions differ markedly from those spoken in southern Italy. In some cases mutual understanding and communication between people speaking different dialects can be rather difficult.