If you ask "where is Italian spoken?" the easy answer is in Italia. The interesting answer is longer. Italian is the official language of one republic (Italy), one micro-republic (San Marino), one city-state (the Vatican), and one canton of a foreign country (Ticino). It is a heritage language for tens of millions across Argentina, the United States, Brazil, Australia, and Canada — the legacy of one of the largest emigrations in modern history. And inside Italy itself, what looks from outside like one country with one language is a patchwork of twenty regions, each with its own historical dialect, its own cuisine, and its own identity.
This page maps the Italian-speaking world at a glance.
Italian as an official language
There are four sovereign states where Italian holds official status, plus territories where it shares the floor with another language.
1. Italia — the Italian Republic
Italy itself: 60 million people, roughly 58 million of whom speak Italian as their first or main language. Italy is the heartland of the language and the only country where Italian is the unmarked daily language for nearly everyone.
The official language is italiano standard, descended from the literary Tuscan crystallised by Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio in the 13th and 14th centuries. But what most Italians actually speak day-to-day is italiano regionale — standard Italian with regional pronunciation, vocabulary, and minor syntactic preferences (see the regional varieties overview). Italy is also home to the dialetti — Neapolitan, Sicilian, Venetian, Lombard, Sardinian, Friulian, and others — which linguists treat as separate Romance languages rather than dialects of Italian.
L'italiano è la lingua ufficiale dell'Italia.
Italian is the official language of Italy.
In Italia ci sono venti regioni, ciascuna con il proprio dialetto.
In Italy there are twenty regions, each with its own dialect.
2. San Marino — the world's oldest republic
The Republic of San Marino is a landlocked state of about 34,000 people, surrounded by Emilia-Romagna and Marche. Founded (according to legend) in 301 CE, it claims to be the oldest continuously surviving republic on earth. Italian is the sole official language; the local variety differs little from the Italian of the surrounding Romagnol countryside.
San Marino è una piccola repubblica circondata dall'Italia.
San Marino is a small republic surrounded by Italy.
3. Stato della Città del Vaticano — Vatican City
The Vatican is the smallest sovereign state in the world (roughly 800 people). Italian is the working language of the Curia and the daily language of nearly all Vatican personnel. Latin remains official for legal and ceremonial purposes — encyclicals, church law — but Italian is what's spoken in the corridors.
In Vaticano si parla italiano, ma la lingua ufficiale della Santa Sede è il latino.
Italian is spoken in the Vatican, but the official language of the Holy See is Latin.
4. Switzerland — the Italian cantons
Switzerland has four national languages: German, French, Italian, and Romansh. Italian is the official language of Canton Ticino (the southernmost canton, including Lugano and Bellinzona) and of four valleys in the eastern canton of Grigioni (Graubünden) — Mesolcina, Calanca, Bregaglia, and Poschiavo.
About 8% of the Swiss population — roughly 700,000 people — speak Italian. Swiss Italian (italiano svizzero) is mostly identical to standard Italian but has a few distinctive lexical items, mostly calques from German federal terminology: natel for "mobile phone," azione for "promotion / sale," riservazione for "reservation." Swiss Italian speakers are bilingual or trilingual as a matter of course, with German as the second language.
In Ticino si parla italiano, ma molti svizzeri italiani conoscono anche il tedesco.
In Ticino people speak Italian, but many Swiss Italians also know German.
For the deep dive, see Italian Switzerland and Ticino.
Significant Italian-speaking communities
Beyond the countries where Italian is official, there are coastal regions and islands where Italian is a heritage language, the legacy of centuries when "Italian-speaking" meant something different from "from the Italian state" (which only existed from 1861).
Slovenia and Croatia — the Istrian coast
The Istrian peninsula spoke Venetian and Italian for centuries under the Republic of Venice (until 1797) and then under various Austrian and Italian regimes. After the upheavals of the 20th century, most ethnic Italians left, but a recognised minority remains: a few thousand Italian speakers in Slovenia (Capodistria/Koper, Isola/Izola, Pirano/Piran) and roughly 18,000 in Croatia (Istria, Rijeka/Fiume). Both states officially recognise Italian as a minority language with educational rights in these areas.
Sulla costa istriana esistono ancora comunità italofone storiche.
On the Istrian coast there are still historic Italian-speaking communities.
For details, see Italian in Slovenia and Croatia.
Malta — historical, not current
Italian was an official language of Malta until 1934, when British administration replaced it with English. Today Maltese and English share official status, and Italian is widely understood — Italian television has been a major presence for decades — but it is no longer a daily language for most Maltese.
The Italian diaspora
This is where Italian's reach becomes vast. Between 1876 and 1976, roughly 26 million Italians emigrated — from a country that, at the start of that period, had only about 27 million people total. The destinations were the Americas (especially the southern cone of South America and the eastern United States), Australia, and northern Europe. The cultural footprint is enormous.
Argentina — the second-largest Italian heritage population
Argentina received the largest single wave of Italian immigration. Roughly 60% of Argentines have some Italian ancestry, the highest proportion of any country outside Italy. Buenos Aires Spanish has been deeply marked by Italian: the local accent is famously Italian-tinged, hand gestures are imported wholesale, and Italian loanwords pepper the lexicon (laburar "to work," facha "look / style"). The lunfardo slang of the Río de la Plata is an Italian-Spanish hybrid in many of its core words.
Active Italian speakers in Argentina today number roughly 1.5 million, mostly older descendants of immigrants.
Quasi sei argentini su dieci hanno antenati italiani.
Nearly six in ten Argentines have Italian ancestors.
A Buenos Aires si sente l'eco dell'italiano nell'accento, nei gesti, nel cibo.
In Buenos Aires you can hear the echo of Italian in the accent, the gestures, the food.
United States — Italian-American culture
Roughly 17 million Americans report Italian ancestry, concentrated in the Northeast, the industrial Midwest, and parts of California. Italian-American culture — the food, the cinema (The Godfather, Goodfellas, The Sopranos), the urban neighbourhoods (Little Italy in Manhattan, the North End in Boston) — is one of the most visible American ethnic identities.
Active Italian-language use, however, has declined sharply since the postwar generation. Their grandparents and great-grandparents spoke Sicilian, Neapolitan, or Calabrian dialects rather than standard Italian. About 700,000 Americans currently speak Italian at home, down from over a million in 2000.
Gli italoamericani sono circa diciassette milioni, ma pochi parlano italiano fluentemente.
Italian-Americans number about seventeen million, but few speak Italian fluently.
Brazil — especially southern Brazil and São Paulo
Roughly 30 million Brazilians have Italian ancestry — the second-largest absolute number after the United States. Italian immigration concentrated in São Paulo and the southern states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, and Paraná. In rural Rio Grande do Sul, an Italian-Portuguese hybrid called Talian developed from the Venetian dialect of the original immigrants; it is now recognised as part of Brazil's intangible cultural heritage.
In Brasile, soprattutto nel sud, vivono milioni di discendenti italiani.
In Brazil, especially in the south, live millions of Italian descendants.
Australia and Canada
Roughly 1 million Australians and 1.5 million Canadians report Italian ancestry. Postwar migration brought large communities to Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide on one side, and Toronto and Montreal on the other. Italian is among the top spoken European languages in all of these cities. Active speakers number around 300,000 in Australia and similar in Canada, again concentrated in older generations.
A Melbourne c'è una delle comunità italiane più grandi fuori dall'Italia.
Melbourne has one of the largest Italian communities outside Italy.
For the full diaspora story, see the Italian diaspora.
Italy's twenty regions
Italy is divided into 20 regions (regioni), each with its own government, capital city, dialect, cuisine, and historical identity. Five of those regions have a special constitutional status (regioni a statuto speciale) that gives them additional autonomy, mostly because of linguistic and historical particularities.
The five regions with special status
| Region | Capital | Reason for special status |
|---|---|---|
| Sicilia | Palermo | Island, distinct dialect, historical autonomy |
| Sardegna | Cagliari | Island, separate language (Sardinian/sardu) |
| Friuli-Venezia Giulia | Trieste | Friulian language, Slovenian minority, border region |
| Trentino-Alto Adige / Südtirol | Trento (alternating with Bolzano) | Bilingual Italian-German, Ladin minority |
| Valle d'Aosta / Vallée d'Aoste | Aosta | Bilingual Italian-French, Franco-Provençal minority |
Trentino-Alto Adige is in many ways more interesting than its bureaucratic name suggests. The northern half of the region — Alto Adige / Südtirol (South Tyrol) — has a German-speaking majority, a legacy of having been part of Austria until 1918. Italian and German share full official status, road signs are bilingual, and the local Ladin minority adds a third recognised language in some valleys. Bolzano (Bozen in German) is one of the few cities in Italy where Italian is not the dominant street language.
Valle d'Aosta is officially bilingual Italian-French, with Franco-Provençal (a separate Gallo-Romance variety) widely spoken in rural areas. It is Italy's smallest and least populous region.
In Alto Adige il tedesco e l'italiano hanno pari dignità ufficiale.
In South Tyrol, German and Italian have equal official status.
In Valle d'Aosta i cartelli stradali sono in italiano e francese.
In Aosta Valley, road signs are in Italian and French.
The other fifteen regions
The remaining fifteen are regioni a statuto ordinario. The North includes Lombardia (Milano), Veneto (Venezia), Piemonte (Torino), Liguria (Genova), and Emilia-Romagna (Bologna), each carrying a Gallo-Italic dialect or Venetian. The Centre comprises Toscana (Firenze, the home of standard Italian), Lazio (Roma, with Romanesco), Marche (Ancona), and Umbria (Perugia). The South includes Abruzzo (L'Aquila), Molise (Campobasso), Campania (Napoli, with Neapolitan), Puglia (Bari), Basilicata (Potenza), and Calabria (Catanzaro). For details on the dialects, see regional varieties of Italian.
North and South: il Mezzogiorno
Italy has a strong cultural and linguistic split between the North (il Nord or il Settentrione) and the South (il Sud or il Mezzogiorno), with the central regions (Lazio, Abruzzo, Marche, Umbria) sitting in between. The term Mezzogiorno ("midday") refers historically to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which until 1861 was a separate state. La questione meridionale — the persistent gap in economic development between north and south — has been a central theme of Italian politics since unification.
For the learner, the divide shows up in pronunciation (open vs closed vowels, southern double consonants, passato remoto in the south where the north uses passato prossimo) and in vocabulary.
La differenza tra Nord e Sud si sente nella pronuncia, nei dialetti, nella cucina.
The difference between North and South can be heard in pronunciation, dialects, and cuisine.
For the linguistic side, see southern Italian and northern Italian.
Common Mistakes
❌ L'italiano si parla solo in Italia.
Wrong — Italian is also official in San Marino, the Vatican, and Swiss Ticino, with significant communities in many other countries.
✅ L'italiano è lingua ufficiale anche a San Marino, in Vaticano e nel Ticino svizzero.
Italian is also an official language in San Marino, the Vatican, and Swiss Ticino.
❌ In Argentina si parla soltanto spagnolo.
Misleading — Spanish is the official language, but roughly 60% of Argentines have Italian ancestry, and the cultural and linguistic influence of Italian is enormous.
✅ L'Argentina è di lingua spagnola, ma ha un'eredità italiana profondissima.
Argentina is a Spanish-speaking country, but it has a profound Italian heritage.
❌ Il napoletano è un accento dell'italiano.
Wrong — Neapolitan is a separate Romance language, not a regional accent of Italian. The same applies to Sicilian, Venetian, Sardinian, and others.
✅ Il napoletano è una lingua romanza distinta, parlata in Campania.
Neapolitan is a distinct Romance language, spoken in Campania.
❌ In Alto Adige tutti parlano italiano come prima lingua.
Wrong — South Tyrol has a German-speaking majority. Italian and German share official status.
✅ In Alto Adige la maggior parte della popolazione è di madrelingua tedesca.
In South Tyrol, the majority of the population is native German-speaking.
❌ Gli italoamericani parlano l'italiano standard.
Misleading — historical Italian-American communities mostly inherited southern dialects (Sicilian, Neapolitan, Calabrian), not standard Italian. And in any case, active Italian use among Italian-Americans has declined sharply.
✅ Gli italoamericani hanno spesso radici nei dialetti meridionali, ma oggi parlano soprattutto inglese.
Italian-Americans often have roots in southern dialects, but today they speak mostly English.
Key takeaways
Italian is official in four states: Italy, San Marino, the Vatican, and (regionally) Switzerland. Significant minority communities live in Slovenia and Croatia.
The Italian diaspora — Argentina, the United States, Brazil, Australia, Canada — is the legacy of one of the largest emigrations in modern history. About 80 million people worldwide claim Italian ancestry.
Italy is divided into 20 regions, five with special autonomous status (Sicilia, Sardegna, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Trentino-Alto Adige, Valle d'Aosta). The autonomous regions reflect linguistic minorities — Sardinian, German, French.
The North-South divide (il Mezzogiorno vs il Nord) is real, historically rooted, and audible in everyday speech.
Underneath the surface of "Italian" is the patchwork of regional varieties and dialects, which linguists treat as separate Romance languages. Standard Italian is the lingua franca that holds it all together.
For Italy itself in detail, see Italy. For the linguistic side of the regional patchwork, see regional varieties of Italian.
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Open the Italian course →Related Topics
- 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.
- The Italian DiasporaB1 — Italians around the world — one of the largest diasporas in modern history. From 1876 to 1976, roughly 26 million people emigrated from a country that started the period with about 27 million inhabitants. The page maps the major destinations (Argentina, Brazil, the United States, France, Germany, Australia, Canada, the UK), explains heritage Italian (italiano d'oltreoceano) — the dialectal, southern-leaning variety preserved by emigrants — and surveys contact phenomena: Cocoliche and Lunfardo in Argentina, Italian-American English in the US, Talian in southern Brazil.
- Italian in Slovenia and Croatia (Istria and the Eastern Adriatic)C1 — The Italian-speaking communities of the eastern Adriatic — coastal Slovenia (Koper/Capodistria, Izola/Isola, Piran/Pirano) and Croatian Istria with its 19 officially bilingual municipalities. The page traces the long history that made this Romance-speaking littoral: Venetian rule until 1797, Austria-Hungary, the Italian state from 1918 to 1947, and the esodo istriano of 1943-1960. It introduces the local Romance varieties — Istriot, Triestino, Istro-Venetian — and explains why the Italian minority's linguistic and legal status differs between the Slovenian and Croatian sides.
- 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.