Italian is one of the most widely-spread languages on earth — not because Italy was an empire, but because Italians left. Between 1876 and 1976, roughly 26 million people emigrated from Italy. The country had about 27 million inhabitants at the start of that period; today there are more people of Italian descent outside Italy than inside it. The phrase Italians use for this scattered second Italy is la grande emigrazione, and the population that descends from it is la diaspora italiana.
This page maps the major destinations and explains why the Italian spoken in Buenos Aires, Brooklyn, or São Paulo so often isn't the standard Italian of textbooks but a southern, dialectal, archaic variety overlaid with loanwords from the host language.
The shape of the diaspora
The basic numbers, rounded for scale rather than precision (estimates vary, especially for descent counts):
| Country | Italian descent | Active speakers | Main waves |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brazil | ~30 million | ~50,000 (Talian + standard) | 1875-1920, especially Veneto, Lombardy, Trentino |
| Argentina | ~25 million | ~1.5 million | 1880-1930, especially southern Italy |
| United States | ~17 million | ~700,000 | 1880-1924, mostly Sicily, Naples, Calabria |
| France | ~5-6 million | ~200,000 | 1870s onward, peak interwar |
| Canada | ~1.5 million | ~375,000 | Postwar (1945-1970), mostly southern Italy |
| Australia | ~1 million | ~270,000 | Postwar (1945-1970), Sicily, Calabria, Veneto |
| Germany | ~700,000 | ~600,000 | 1955 onward (Gastarbeiter agreement) |
| United Kingdom | ~250,000-500,000 | ~150,000-200,000 | Postwar, especially Bedford and London |
| Belgium | ~300,000 | ~200,000 | Postwar (1946 Italo-Belgian coal agreement) |
Adding it up, roughly 80 million people worldwide claim Italian ancestry — more than the population of Italy itself (~59 million). Active Italian-language use is much smaller and concentrated in specific contexts, but Italian remains a heritage language for tens of millions.
Si stima che nel mondo vivano circa ottanta milioni di persone di origine italiana.
It is estimated that around eighty million people of Italian origin live in the world.
Tra il 1876 e il 1976 circa ventisei milioni di italiani emigrarono.
Between 1876 and 1976, around twenty-six million Italians emigrated.
Argentina: a country profoundly Italian
Argentina received the largest single wave of Italian immigration relative to its population. Between 1880 and 1930, more than 2 million Italians arrived — in a country whose total population at the start of the period was only 1.7 million. Roughly 60% of Argentines have some Italian ancestry, the highest proportion in any country outside Italy.
The local accent of Buenos Aires Spanish — porteño speech — has a notably Italian-tinged intonation that puzzles other Spanish speakers. Italian hand gestures were imported wholesale. Italian loanwords pepper the lexicon: laburar (to work, from lavorare), facha (look, from faccia), chau (from ciao), fiaca (laziness, from southern Italian fiacca), yeta (bad luck, from iettatura).
A Buenos Aires l'eredità italiana si sente nell'accento, nei gesti, perfino nelle parole di tutti i giorni.
In Buenos Aires the Italian heritage is felt in the accent, the gestures, even in everyday words.
Quasi sei argentini su dieci hanno almeno un antenato italiano.
Nearly six in ten Argentines have at least one Italian ancestor.
Cocoliche and Lunfardo
When Italian immigrants arrived speaking the dialects of their home regions — Genoese, Piedmontese, Neapolitan, Sicilian, Calabrian — they were thrown into contact with Argentine Spanish without going through standard Italian. The result was Cocoliche: an unstable mixed variety, a kind of Italo-Spanish creole spoken by the immigrant generation, with Italian morphology overlaid with Spanish vocabulary and syntax. Cocoliche was transitional — by the second generation, children switched fully to Spanish — but it survived as a stylistic resource in sainete criollo (popular Argentine theatre of the early 20th century).
Lunfardo is the slang of the Río de la Plata, and a substantial portion of its core vocabulary comes from southern Italian dialects. The word lunfardo itself probably derives from lombardo. Hundreds of lunfardo words have direct Italian roots: laburar (to work, from lavorare), fiaca (laziness, from Sicilian fiacca), guita (money), mufa (gloom, from muffa), yeta (jinx, from iettatura), capo (boss), pibe (kid, from pivello). Lunfardo is alive and productive — modern hip-hop relies on it, and tango lyrics from the 1920s are saturated with it.
Molte parole del lunfardo argentino vengono direttamente dai dialetti italiani meridionali.
Many words of Argentine lunfardo come directly from southern Italian dialects.
Brazil: 30 million descendants
Brazil received the second-largest wave of Italian immigration in absolute terms, concentrated in São Paulo state (the coffee plantations needed labour after slavery was abolished in 1888) and in the southern states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, and Paraná. The southern Brazilian Italians came overwhelmingly from northern Italy — especially Veneto and Trentino — and they arrived in compact rural settlements where Venetian remained the daily language for generations. The result was Talian.
Talian (a name reflecting its own pronunciation of italiano) is a Veneto-derived contact language spoken in the rural south of Brazil, particularly in the Serra Gaúcha of Rio Grande do Sul. Its speakers descend from Venetian peasants who arrived in the 1870s-1900s. Talian preserves the Venetian dialect of the original immigrants, with influence from Lombard, Friulian, and Trentino dialects (the communities mixed at the destination), plus loanwords from Portuguese. It was recognised by the Brazilian state as part of the country's intangible cultural heritage in 2014.
Nel sud del Brasile, soprattutto in Rio Grande do Sul, sopravvive il talian, una varietà di origine veneta.
In southern Brazil, especially in Rio Grande do Sul, Talian survives — a variety of Venetian origin.
Il talian è stato riconosciuto patrimonio culturale immateriale del Brasile.
Talian has been recognised as an intangible cultural heritage of Brazil.
In São Paulo, Italian immigration concentrated in working-class neighbourhoods like Bixiga and Mooca. Paulistas largely shifted to Portuguese, but the cultural footprint shaped the city's culinary culture and Sunday family-meal traditions.
United States: 17 million Italian-Americans
The United States received roughly 4 million Italian immigrants between 1880 and 1924, when restrictive immigration legislation (the Johnson-Reed Act) cut the flow to a trickle. Today about 17 million Americans report Italian ancestry, concentrated in the Northeast, the industrial Midwest, and parts of California.
Italian-American immigration was overwhelmingly southern: Sicilian, Neapolitan, Calabrian, Pugliese. The Italian they brought was not standard Italian but the dialect of their village. A Sicilian peasant from Agrigento and a Calabrian peasant from Cosenza spoke mutually unintelligible languages at home, even before learning English.
Gli emigranti italiani negli Stati Uniti vennero soprattutto dal sud: Sicilia, Campania, Calabria, Puglia.
Italian emigrants to the United States came mostly from the south: Sicily, Campania, Calabria, Puglia.
Italian-American English
Active Italian-language use has declined sharply: about 700,000 currently speak Italian at home, down from over a million in 2000. But the linguistic legacy in Italian-American English is huge. The vocabulary of Italian-American food culture is taken almost wholesale from southern Italian dialects, with characteristic phonetic adaptations:
| Italian-American | Standard Italian | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| gabagool | capocollo | cured pork shoulder; Sicilian/Neapolitan: voiced c → g, deleted final o |
| mootzarell | mozzarella | Neapolitan-influenced final vowel deletion |
| manicott | manicotti | final i dropped |
| ricot | ricotta | final a dropped |
| scungilli | conchiglia / sconciglio (Neapolitan) | conch / sea snail |
| braciole | braciola | rolled meat; Neapolitan pronunciation |
| marone / madon' | Madonna | exclamation, Neapolitan final-vowel deletion |
These are not "wrong" Italian — they are southern Italian dialectal forms filtered through American English. A Neapolitan or Sicilian visiting New York's Little Italy will recognise the words as familiar, while a Milanese or Florentine may need a moment.
The cultural footprint of Italian-Americans is vast: Frank Sinatra (Sicilian/Genoese descent), Madonna, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Lady Gaga (Sicilian/Friulian descent), Bruce Springsteen, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Nancy Pelosi, and many more.
Tra gli italoamericani più famosi ci sono Frank Sinatra, Robert De Niro, Madonna e Lady Gaga.
Among the most famous Italian-Americans are Frank Sinatra, Robert De Niro, Madonna, and Lady Gaga.
Other major destinations
France received roughly 5-6 million Italian descendants, with peaks in the 1870s, interwar years, and postwar boom. Concentrations in the southeast (Nice, Marseille), Paris, and the industrial north. Active Italian use has declined sharply under French integration policies.
Germany: a postwar story. The Italo-German labour agreement of 1955 brought hundreds of thousands of southern Italian workers to German factories and mines. Italian remains an active community language for around 600,000 speakers.
Australia received about 1 million Italian descendants through postwar migration; Sicilian and Calabrian communities are large in Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide. Canada: about 1.5 million report Italian descent, concentrated in Toronto (which has the largest Italian community outside Italy by some metrics) and Montreal. Belgium: the Italo-Belgian protocol of 1946 sent about 50,000 Italian miners to Belgium in exchange for coal exports. The Bois du Cazier mining disaster of 1956 — 262 miners died, 136 of them Italian — became a defining event of postwar Italian migration.
Toronto ospita una delle più grandi comunità italiane fuori dall'Italia.
Toronto hosts one of the largest Italian communities outside Italy.
Italiano d'oltreoceano: the heritage variety
The Italian preserved by diaspora communities — what Italian linguists call italiano d'oltreoceano ("overseas Italian") — has predictable features:
Dialectal core: The home language is the regional dialect of the immigrant generation, not standard Italian. Italian-American speech is rooted in southern dialects; Talian in Venetian; the Italo-Argentine substrate is heavily Calabrian and Sicilian.
Archaic vocabulary: Words that have fallen out of use in modern Italy often survive abroad. An Italian-American speaker may use furniciaro for "furniture maker" or bordante for "boarder" — words that disappeared from Italy decades ago but remained current in the diaspora.
Loanwords from the host language: bisinisse for "business," carro for "car," renta for "rent," fattoria for "factory" rather than its standard Italian sense of "farm."
Generational decline: The immigrant generation speaks the dialect natively, the second understands it but answers in the host language, the third has only passive or symbolic knowledge.
L'italiano della diaspora conserva spesso forme dialettali e parole arcaiche.
Diaspora Italian often preserves dialectal forms and archaic words.
In molte famiglie italoamericane la prima generazione parlava il dialetto, la seconda lo capiva, la terza non più.
In many Italian-American families the first generation spoke the dialect, the second understood it, the third no longer.
The Italian state's response
The Italian state has formal mechanisms for engaging with the diaspora:
- AIRE (Anagrafe degli Italiani Residenti all'Estero) is the registry of Italian citizens living abroad: about 6 million people are registered. AIRE Italians have voting rights, including a dedicated circoscrizione estero that elects 12 MPs.
- Italian-language schools abroad operate in major diaspora cities — Buenos Aires, São Paulo, New York, Madrid, London.
- The Dante Alighieri Society (founded 1889) runs hundreds of Italian-language committees worldwide.
- The Comites are elected representative bodies of the Italian diaspora in each major host country.
Circa sei milioni di cittadini italiani sono iscritti all'AIRE, l'anagrafe degli italiani residenti all'estero.
About six million Italian citizens are registered with AIRE, the registry of Italians residing abroad.
Common Mistakes
❌ Gli italoamericani parlano l'italiano standard.
Wrong — most Italian-Americans inherited southern dialectal Italian (Sicilian, Neapolitan, Calabrian), not standard Italian. And in any case, active Italian use has declined sharply.
✅ Gli italoamericani hanno radici nei dialetti meridionali; oggi la maggior parte parla soprattutto inglese.
Italian-Americans have roots in southern dialects; today most speak mostly English.
❌ La diaspora italiana è composta da pochi milioni di persone.
Wrong — the Italian diaspora numbers around 80 million people of Italian descent worldwide.
✅ La diaspora italiana conta circa ottanta milioni di persone di origine italiana nel mondo.
The Italian diaspora numbers around eighty million people of Italian origin worldwide.
❌ Gli emigranti italiani in Argentina venivano soprattutto dal nord.
Misleading — early emigration to Argentina included substantial Genoese and Piedmontese components, but the larger and later wave (1880-1930) was predominantly southern: Calabrian, Neapolitan, Sicilian.
✅ L'emigrazione italiana in Argentina ebbe componenti sia settentrionali sia, soprattutto dopo il 1880, meridionali.
Italian emigration to Argentina had both northern components and, especially after 1880, southern ones.
❌ Il talian è una lingua creola africana.
Wrong — Talian is a Veneto-derived contact language spoken in southern Brazil, with influence from Portuguese.
✅ Il talian è una varietà di origine veneta parlata nel sud del Brasile.
Talian is a Venetian-derived variety spoken in southern Brazil.
❌ Tutti gli emigranti italiani parlavano l'italiano.
Wrong — at the start of mass emigration (1870s), most emigrants spoke their home regional language (Sicilian, Calabrian, Venetian) rather than standard Italian. Standard Italian was a school-acquired second variety for most of them.
✅ Molti emigranti partivano parlando il dialetto regionale, non l'italiano standard.
Many emigrants left speaking the regional dialect, not standard Italian.
Key takeaways
The Italian diaspora — about 80 million people of Italian descent worldwide — is one of the largest in modern history. Roughly 26 million people emigrated from Italy between 1876 and 1976.
The largest communities are in Brazil (~30 million), Argentina (~25 million), the United States (~17 million), and France (~5-6 million). Waves differ: late 19th-century to interwar to the Americas; postwar to northern Europe and Australia/Canada.
Italiano d'oltreoceano — the heritage variety — is typically dialectal, southern-leaning, archaic, and overlaid with host-language loanwords. Not "wrong" Italian; a snapshot of a regional variety frozen at emigration.
Three contact languages stand out: Cocoliche (Italo-Spanish in Argentina), Lunfardo (Buenos Aires slang with deep Italian roots), and Talian (Veneto-Portuguese in southern Brazil).
The Italian state engages actively with the diaspora through AIRE registration (~6 million registered), Italian-language schools abroad, the Dante Alighieri Society, and an overseas parliamentary constituency electing 12 MPs.
For the Swiss case, see Italian in Switzerland and Ticino; for the broader picture, see Italian-speaking countries: overview.
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Open the Italian course →Related Topics
- Italian-Speaking Countries: OverviewA2 — Where Italian is spoken in the world — Italy, San Marino, the Vatican, Italian Switzerland, the Istrian coast, and the major diaspora communities in Argentina, the United States, Brazil, Australia, and Canada. Plus a tour of Italy's twenty regions and the linguistic diversity that hides inside the apparent monolith of italiano.
- Italy: Regions and Linguistic MapA2 — A tour of Italy's twenty regions — Northern, Central, Southern, and the two great islands — and the historical, cultural, and linguistic patchwork inside the modern republic. Special attention to the five autonomous regions, the bilingual zones (Italian-German, Italian-French, Italian-Slovenian), and the persistent North-South divide known as la questione meridionale.
- San Marino and Vatican CityA2 — The two Italian-speaking microstates surrounded by Italy: the Republic of San Marino — claiming to be the world's oldest surviving sovereign state — and the Vatican City, the smallest internationally-recognised state on earth. Both use Italian as their working administrative language, but each has its own peculiar arrangement: San Marino with its rotating Captain Regents and a Romagnol-flavoured local speech, the Vatican with Italian alongside Latin as the language of the Holy See.
- Italian in Switzerland: Ticino and BeyondB1 — Italian as one of the four national languages of Switzerland — the speech of Canton Ticino, the four Italian-speaking valleys of Graubünden, and roughly 600,000 speakers in total. The page explains italiano svizzero (Swiss Italian) — its calques from German federal vocabulary (natel for mobile phone, azione for sale, casetta postale for PO box), its slightly different rhythm, and the institutions that keep it alive: RSI broadcasting, Italian-medium schools, and a small but distinctive literary scene.
- Regional Varieties of Italian: OverviewB1 — An introduction to the spectrum of language varieties spoken in Italy. The page distinguishes standard Italian (italiano standard, Tuscan-based, the language of media and education), regional Italian (italiano regionale — standard with local accent and lexicon), and the dialetti (genuinely distinct language varieties such as Neapolitan, Sicilian, Venetian, Sardinian, Milanese, and Friulian — many of them treated as separate Romance languages by linguists). It explains diglossia, the generational decline of dialects, and why even RAI hosts have audible regional accents.
- Southern Italian: Neapolitan, Sicilian InfluenceB1 — The regional Italian of Naples, Calabria, Sicily, and Apulia — strong raddoppiamento sintattico, productive passato remoto, voi as formal singular among elders, the substitution of tenere for avere ('tengo fame' for 'ho fame'), and a rich substrate of Neapolitan and Sicilian vocabulary that surfaces in regional speech.