Italy.  Oh how the heart races at the thought. What a beautiful country. What fantastic food. What romantic men. There is so much about Italy that really pulls the heart strings.

Some people laughingly like to say they can speak Italian – like for example – “spaghetti, ravioli, pizza, tagliatelli, ricotta, panettoni, risotto”.  But of course there is a lot more to Italy than just food.  Yes a lot of Italian words have crept into English and I do not think there would be a single English speaking person who does not know some words of Italian but not so many of us actually learn how to speak it.

It is spoken by about 60 million people in Italy, and by about 70 million throughout the world so that means there are about 10 million people not living in Italy who can speak Italian.    It is spoken in Switzerland, San Marino,  Vatican City,  Slovenia, Croatia,  Libya,  Ethiopia,  Eritrea,  Somalia,  France (esp. Corsica) and of course among immigrants in many other countries.

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Italian is written in the Latin alphabet.  The letters J, K, W, X and Y are not considered part of the standard Italian alphabet but appear in words that have been borrowed from other languages.

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