Italian phrasebook
Photo: User:Rnt20, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Italian (italiano) is the official language of Italy and San Marino, and one of the four official languages of Switzerland, spoken mainly in the cantons of Ticino and Graubünden (Grigioni). It is the primary language of the Vatican City, where it is co-official with Latin, and a co-official language in Istria, a coastal region of Slovenia and Croatia. Furthermore, it is understood by a sizable minority in Malta, Monaco, the French island of Corsica, and Albania. Outside of Europe, remnants of Italian are found in Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia.
In most of the touristy resorts along Italy's coasts, English and German are widely spoken, but in any part of Italy, it will hold you in good stead to know at least basic phrases of polite Italian and not to assume that whoever you are speaking with will know your language.
Italian is the most important language in classical music, with most operas being written in Italian, and musical notation on scores being primarily in Italian. All musicians who play Western music are required to be familiar with Italian musical terminology, and it was de rigueur for European composers from the Renaissance to the first half of the 20th century to have at least some basic knowledge of Italian.
If you speak Spanish or even Portuguese, be careful as there are a lot of words that look and sound almost the same in these languages but convey very different meanings: for example, Spanish guardar ("to store, shelve") vs. Italian guardare ("to see, watch"), Spanish salir ("to get out") vs. Italian salire ("to go up"), Spanish burro ("donkey") vs. Italian burro ("butter"), Spanish caldo ("soup") vs. Italian caldo ("hot"), Spanish aceite ("oil") vs Italian aceto ("vinegar") and Spanish sembrar ("to sow, plant") vs Italian sembrare ("to seem").
GrammarAll Italian nouns are assigned one of two genders: masculine or feminine.g. tavolo [table] is masculine, casa [house] is feminine).g.
PronunciationPronunciation is relatively easy in Italian since most words are pronounced exactly how they are written. The main letters to watch out for are c and g, since their pronunciation varies based on the following vowel.
Cognates in EnglishEnglish-speakers will find many Italian words easy to understand, if they know Latin-derived equivalents in English. For example, words that end in -tion in English as a rule end in -zione in Italian.
Phrase listFor this phrasebook, we use the polite form for all phrases, on the presumption that you'll mostly be talking to people you don't already know.
Sources and licences
- Guide text adapted from the Wikivoyage article "Italian phrasebook" by its contributors, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read on Wikivoyage · Contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0
- Photo: User:Rnt20, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons