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Article Evaluation

 * 1) The lead section appears to provide a little too much detail about the history of the Italian language. Some components of the third paragraph would be better situated as an introductory paragraph in the history subsection. I've noticed that this seems to be the case generally in other language articles.
 * 2) The population of native speakers is closer to 64 million than it is to 65 million. Also, there are two citations for this content that provide the same information. One of them is unnecessary, because it was published in 2006 whereas the other was published in 2012 (providing more accurate data) - Completed
 * 3) Perhaps add a section on the geographical expansion of Italian (and the different dialects) over the course of history.
 * 4) Perhaps add a section on the development of Latin from Italian, and the grammatical and phonological similarities that occur.
 * 5) The grammar and phonology section seems lacking and I could definitely be expanded further.
 * 6) https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JttCb4GHLqsC&oi=fnd&pg=PP2&dq=italian+language&ots=Pz-5NY01fa&sig=SJ28XVQtvUWF1XTLtveLEOviNEs#v=onepage&q=italian%20language&f=false
 * 7) http://aboutworldlanguages.com/italian
 * 8) https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english-italian
 * 9) Add a section on "common sayings" in Italitan
 * 10) Create a table detailing the number of Italian speakers in different countries
 * 11) http://aboutworldlanguages.com/italian
 * 12) Subsection "Historical Sound Changes" has nothing underneath it except a placeholder. Should delete. - Completed

Origins
During the Middle Ages, the established written language in Europe was Latin. With the overwhelming majority of people illiterate however, only a tiny handful were well versed in the language. In Italy, as in all other countries, the majority would instead speak the vernacular (native tongue) of their region. These dialects (as they are commonly referred to as) were derived from Vulgar Latin over the course of centuries, evolving naturally unaffected by formal standards and teachings. However, it should be noted that these Languages of Italy are not truly "dialects" of Standard Italian, evolving independently (and alongside) of the predecessor of Standard Italian. They are often mutually unintelligible, and are better classified as distinct languages.

The Standard Italian language evolved from the Florentine Tuscan language of Italy. It has a poetic and literary origin in the writings of Tuscan writers of the 12th century, and, even though the grammar and core lexicon are basically unchanged from those used in Florence in the 13th century, the modern standard of the language was largely shaped by relatively recent events. However, Italian as a language spoken in Italy and some surrounding regions has a longer history. In fact, the earliest surviving texts that can definitely be called Italian (or more accurately, vernacular, as distinct from its predecessor Vulgar Latin) are legal formulae known as the Placiti Cassinesi from the Province of Benevento that date from 960–963, although the Veronese Riddle contains a late form of Vulgar Latin that can be seen as a very early Italian dialect. What would come to be thought of as Italian was first formalized in the early 14th century through the works of Tuscan writer Dante Alighieri, written in his native Florentine. Dante's epic poems, known collectively as the Commedia, to which another Tuscan poet Giovanni Boccaccio later affixed the title Divina, were read throughout Italy and his written dialect became the "canonical standard" that all educated Italians could understand. Dante is still credited with standardizing the Italian language. In addition to the widespread exposure gained through literature, the Florentine language also gained prestige due to the political and cultural significance of Florence at the time and the fact that it was linguistically an intermediate between northern and southern dialects. Thus the dialect of Florence became the basis for what would become the official language of Italy.

Italian often was an official language of the various Italian states predating unification, slowly replacing Latin, even when ruled by foreign powers (such as the Spanish in the Kingdom of Naples, or the Austrians in the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia), even though the masses spoke primarily vernacular languages and dialects. Italian was also one of the many recognised languages in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

As Standard (Tuscan-derived) Italian came to be used throughout Italy, features of the local languages (mentioned earlier) were naturally adopted, producing various versions of Regional Italian. The most characteristic differences, for instance, between Roman Italian and Milanese Italian are the gemination of initial consonants and the pronunciation of stressed "e", and of "s" in some cases: e.g. va bene "all right": is pronounced [va ˈbːɛne] by a Roman (and by any standard-speaker), [va ˈbene] by a Milanese (and by any speaker whose native dialect lies to the north of La Spezia–Rimini Line); a casa "at home" is [a ˈkːasa] for Roman and standard, [a ˈkaza] for Milanese and generally northern.

In contrast to the Gallo-Italic languages of northern Italy, the Italo-Dalmatian Neapolitan language and its dialects were largely unaffected by the Franco-Occitan influences introduced to Italy mainly by bards from France during the Middle Ages, but after the Norman conquest of southern Italy, Sicily became the first Italian land to adopt Occitan lyric moods (and words) in poetry. Even in the case of Northern Italian languages, however, scholars are careful not to overstate the effects of outsiders on the natural indigenous developments of the languages.

The economic might and relatively advanced development of Tuscany at the time (Late Middle Ages) gave its language weight, though the Venetian language remained widespread in medieval Italian commercial life, and Ligurian (or Genoese) remained in use in maritime trade alongside the Mediterranean. The increasing political and cultural relevance of Florence during the periods of the rise of the Banco Medici, Humanism, and the Renaissance made its dialect, or rather a refined version of it, a standard in the arts.

Grammar
Italian grammar is typical of the grammar of Romance languages in general. Cases exist for personal pronouns (nominative, oblique, accusative, dative), but not for nouns.

There are two genders (masculine and feminine). Masculine nouns end in -o, which changes to -i in the plural, and feminine nouns ends in -a, which changes to -e in the plural. With few exceptions, masculine nouns refer to male people or animals, and feminine nouns refer to female people or animals. A last class of nouns end in -e in the singular and -i in the plural, and are arbitrarily assigned masculine or feminine. These nouns often denote inanimate objects. This is fixed by the grammar of Italian, and a dictionary would need to be consulted to figure out the gender. There is a number of nouns that change their gender from the singular to plural, having a masculine singular and a feminine plural, and thus are sometimes considered neuter (those are derived from neuter Latin nouns). An instance of neuter gender also exists in pronouns of the third person singular.

Examples:

Nouns, adjectives, and articles inflect for gender and number (singular and plural).

Like in English, common nouns are capitalized when occurring at the beginning of a sentence. Unlike English, nouns referring to languages (e.g. Italian), speakers of languages, or inhabitants of an area (e.g. Italians).

There are three types of adjectives: descriptive, invariable and form-changing. Descriptive adjectives are the most common, and their endings change to match the number and gender of the noun they modify. Invariable adjectives are adjectives whose endings do not change. The form changing adjectives "buono (good), bello (beautiful), grande (big), and santo (saint)" change in form when placed before different types of nouns. Italian has three degrees for comparison of adjectives: positive, comparative, and superlative.

The order of words in the phrase is relatively free compared to most European languages. The position of the verb in the phrase is highly mobile. Word order often has a lesser grammatical function in Italian than in English. Adjectives are sometimes placed before their noun and sometimes after. Subject nouns generally come before the verb. Italian is a null-subject language, so that nominative pronouns are usually absent, with subject indicated by verbal inflections (e.g. amo 'I love', ama 's/he loves', amano 'they love'). Noun objects normally come after the verb, as do pronoun objects after imperative verbs, infinitives and gerunds, but otherwise pronoun objects come before the verb.

There are both indefinite and definite articles in Italian. There are four indefinite articles, which vary based on the gender and first letter of the noun they modify. Uno is used before a masculine singular noun beginning with z, s+consonant, gn, or ps. Un is used before masculine singular nouns beginning with any other letters. Una is used before a feminine singular noun beginning with any consonant. Un'  is used before a feminine singular noun beginning with any vowel. There are seven definite articles, both singular and plural. In the singular: lo, which corresponds to the uses of uno; il, which corresponds to the uses of un, la, which corresponds to the uses of una; l', used before both masculine and feminine nouns and corresponds to un'  in the feminine and un in the masculine. In the plural: gli, the plural of lo and l'; i, the plural of il; and le, the plural of la and l '. If an adjective also precedes the noun, the article used corresponds with the adjective.

There are numerous contractions of prepositions with subsequent articles. There are numerous productive suffixes for diminutive, augmentative, pejorative, attenuating etc., which are also used to create neologisms.

There are 27 pronouns, grouped in clitic and tonic pronouns. Personal pronouns are separated into three groups: subject, object (which take the place of both direct and indirect objects), and reflexive. Second person subject pronouns have both a polite and a familiar form. These two different types of address are very important in Italian social distinctions. All object pronouns have two forms: stressed and unstressed. Unstressed object pronouns are much more frequently used, and come before the verb. Stressed object pronouns come after the verb, and are used when emphasis is required or to avoid ambiguity. Aside from personal pronouns, Italian also has demonstrative, interrogative, possessive, and relative pronouns. There are two types of demonstrative pronouns: relatively near (this) and relatively far (that). Demonstratives in Italian are repeated before each noun, unlike in English.

There are three regular sets of verbal conjugations, and various verbs are irregularly conjugated. Within each of these sets of conjugations, there are four simple (one-word) verbal conjugations by person/number in the indicative mood (present tense; past tense with imperfective aspect, past tense with perfective aspect, and future tense), two simple conjugations in the subjunctive mood (present tense and past tense), one simple conjugation in the conditional mood, and one simple conjugation in the imperative mood. Corresponding to each of the simple conjugations, there is a compound conjugation involving a simple conjugation of "to be" or "to have" followed by a past participle. "To have" is used to form compound conjugation when the verb is transitive ("Ha detto", "ha fatto": he/she has said, he/she has made/done), while "to be" is used in the case of verbs of motion and some other intransitive verbs ("È andato", "è stato": he/she has gone, he/she has been). "To be" may be used with transitive verbs, but in such a case it makes the verb passive ("Ê detto", "è fatto": it is said, it is made/done). This rule is not absolute, and some exceptions do exist.

Dialects
Throughout Italy, regional variations of Standard Italian, called Regional Italian, are spoken. In Italy, almost all Romance languages spoken as the vernacular—other than Standard Italian and distantly-related, non-Romance languages spoken in border regions or among immigrant communities—are often imprecisely called "Italian dialects", even though they are quite different, with some belonging to different branches of the Romance language family. The only exceptions to this are Sardinian, Ladin and Friulian, which are officially recognized as distinct regional languages by the law. On the other hand, Corsican (a language spoken in France on the island of Corsica) is closely related to Tuscan, from which Standard Italian derives and evolved.'

The differences in the evolution of Latin in the different regions of Italy can be attributed to the presence of three other types of languages: substratums, superstratums, and adstratums. The most prevalent were substratums (the language of the original inhabitants), as the Italian dialects were most likely simply Latin as spoken by native cultural groups. Superstratums and adstratums were both less important. Foreign conquerors of Italy that dominated different regions at different times left behind little to no influence on the dialects. Foregin cultures with which Italy engaged in peaceful relations were not influential either.

Regional differences can be recognized by various factors: the openness of vowels, the length of the consonants, and influence of the local language (for e`xample, in informal situations the contraction annà replaces andare in the area of Rome for the infinitive "to go"; and nare is what Venetians say for the infinitive "to go").

It is hard to say when exactly the Italian dialects came into existence as a language distinct from Vulgar Latin, from which it was derived. Although there is much debate regarding this topic, it is generally agreed upon that an Italian dialect (the vernacular) came into existence when its speakers realized that it and Latin were two entirely different languages, rather than simply different dialects of the same language (one spoken and one written). For the Italian Romance languages, evidence of their existence exists in texts from the ninth and tenth century, which can be found with vernacular characteristics and mentions of the use of the vernacular in Italy. Literary manifestations of the vernacular would surface around the 13th century in the form of various religious texts and poetry.

Throughout the 19th and 20th century, the use of Standard Italian became increasingly widespread, and was mirrored by a decline in the use of the dialects. An increase in literacy was one of the main driving factor behind this (one can assume that only literates were capable of learning Standard Italian, whereas those who were illiterate were only capable of using their native dialect). The percentage of literates rose from 25% in 1861 to 60% in 1911, and then on to 78.1% in 1951. Tullio De Mauro, an Italian linguist, has asserted that in 1861 only 2.5% of the population of Italy could speak Standard Italian. He reports that in 1951 the percentage of the population that could speak Standard Italian had rose to 87%. It should be noted that the capability to speak Italian did not necessarily equate to its everyday usage, and most people (63.5%) still usually used their native dialects. In addition, other factors such as mass emigration, industrialization and urbanization, and internal migrations after World War II contributed to the proliferation of Standard Italian. The Italians who emigrated during the Italian Disaspora beginning in 1861 were often of the uneducated lower class, and thus the emigration had the effect of increasing the percentage of literates, who often knew and understood the importance of Standard Italian, back home in Italy. A large percentage of those who had emigrated also eventually returned to Italy, and often more educated than when they had left.

The Italian dialects have declined approaching the modern era, as Italy unified under Standard Italian and continues to do so aided by mass media, from newspapers to radios to television. However, it is still estimated that around half of the population of Italy does not learn Standard Italian as a first language, and only come into contact with it during schooling.