The official language of Italy is Standard Italian, desecendant of Tuscan dialect and a direct descendant of Latin (75% of Italian words are of Lation origin). However, when Italy was unified, 1861, Italian existed mainly as a literary language, and was spoken by less than 3% of the population.

Today, despite regional variations in the form of accents and vowel emphasis, Italian is fully comprehensible to most throughout the country.

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• In the north, the province of Bolzano has a majority German -speaking population; the area was awarded to Italy following the First World War and her defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Pockets of German speakers also persist in other north Italian regions: the Cimbrians in Veneto ( Asiago , Luserna , etc.) and the Walsers in Val'Aosta ( Gressoney ). In total some 300,000 or so Italians speak German as their first language and indeed many identify themselves as ethnic Austrians.
• Some 120,000 or so people live in the Aosta Valley region, where a dialect of Franco-Provençal is spoken that is similar to dialects spoken in France . About 1,400 people living in two isolated towns in Foggia speak another dialect of Franco-Provençal.
• About 80,000 Slovene -speakers live in the north-eastern region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia near the border with Slovenia.
• In the Dolomite mountains of Trentino-South Tyrol and Veneto there are some 40,000 speakers of the Rhaetian language Ladin .
• A very large community of some 700,000 people in Friuli speak Frilian —another Rhaetian language.
• In the Molise region of central-south Italy some 4,000 people speak Molise Croatian . These are the Molise Croats , descendants of a group of people who migrated from the Balkans in the Middle Ages.
• Scattered across sothern Italy ( Salento and Calabria ) are a number of some 30,000 Greek -speakers—considered to be the last surviving traces of the region's Greek heritage. (Ancient Greek colonists reached southern Italy and Sicily about 1500 BC.) They speak a Greek dialect, Griko .
• Some 15,000 Catalan speakers reside around the area of Alghero in the north-west corner of Sardinia —believed to be the result of a migration of a large group of Catalans from Barcelona in ages past.
• The Arbëreshë , of whom there are around 100,000 in southern Italy and in central Sicily —the result of past migrations—are speakers of the Arbëresh dialect of Albanian .
• Sicilianu is spoken in Sicily by 4,832,520 people, nearly the entire population of the island. Again, it is commonly assumed to be a dialect, though it is distinct enough from Italian to be classified separately by Ethnologue . [22]

Finally, the largest group of non-Italian speakers, some 1.3 million people, are those who speak Sadinian , a Romance language which retains many pre-Latin words.