““ Speaking Italian Italian is a Romance language, meaning that it is based on Latin, the language of ancient Rome. Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Romanian are also Romance languages. Many people who speak only Spanish can understand and be understood by Italians. The Italian spoken today originated with Tuscan Italian, a mixture of dialects, or varieties, from the region of Tuscany. In the 1300s, Dante Alighieri wrote The Divine Comedy in Tuscan Italian. The leading writers of the Renaissance also used Tuscan Italian. Although Italian is the nation’s main language, several Italian dialects are spoken. These include Friulian, which is spoken by about six hundred thousand people in the northeast of the country, and Sicilian. People in Calabria, the boot’s foot, use a dialect that includes a lot of Greek words. These came to the region more than two thousand years ago, when the Greeks colonized the region.””
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