Italian Dialects: How Many There Are, Where They're Spoken and Why They're Fading

From Latin to vernaculars

When the Roman Empire spread Latin across most of the peninsula, the language didn’t stay uniform everywhere. Over the following centuries, spoken Latin evolved differently in each area, blending with the local speech that came before it: this is how vernaculars emerged, the original name for what we now call regional languages and dialects.

In the Middle Ages, according to the Accademia della Crusca, every local language went by the name vernacular, Florentine included. At that stage, Florentine was competing on close to equal footing with the rest: none of them had yet earned the status of a national language. It was only after the 1500s that Florentine settled in as the reference for educated speech, and the other vernaculars slid, in name and in function, into the rank of dialects — languages that no longer cover every communicative need of an entire community.

How many, according to those who study them

Asking how many dialects Italy has doesn’t lead to one answer. As Treccani points out, popular perception treats dialects the way it treats village bell towers: there’s one for every town, every valley has its own shade of difference. Scholars have looked for steadier criteria to sort those differences into broader systems.

The first attempt came from Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, who between 1882 and 1885 proposed measuring how far each area’s speech had drifted from Tuscan, treated as the dialect closest to the shared Latin base. In 1924 Clemente Merlo took a different angle: he argued the deciding factor was substrate, meaning the imprint left by the languages spoken in Italy before Latin arrived. In 1937 Gerhard Rohlfs introduced a geographic criterion, drawing two boundary lines: the La Spezia-Rimini line and the Roma-Ancona line.

The classification most scholars accept today is the one Giovan Battista Pellegrini put forward in 1975, which sorts Italo-Romance dialects into five major systems.

System	Main areas	A defining trait
Northern (Gallo-Italic)	Piedmont, Lombardy, Liguria, Emilia	Fronted vowels (lüna, cör) and the loss of final vowels other than -a
Friulian (Ladin)	Friuli	Treated as separate from the other northern groups
Tuscan (central)	Tuscany	Very close structural ties to standard Italian
Central-southern	Lazio, Abruzzo, Molise and much of central-southern Italy	Metaphony and consonant assimilation
Sardinian	Sardinia	Set apart from the other four in Pellegrini’s classification

Alongside these five, scholars often carve out a sixth area: the extreme southern dialects of Salento, southern Calabria and Sicily, which share a five-vowel stressed sound system (/i/, /ɛ/, /a/, /ɔ/, /u/), unlike the seven stressed vowels of Tuscan and standard Italian.

Practical example: a speaker from Lombardy and one from Puglia reading the same text aloud in their own dialect would struggle to recognize even the most common words: they belong to two different systems, northern and central-southern, split by the La Spezia-Rimini line, with vowels and consonants that evolved along separate paths for centuries.

The line that divides Italy

The most cited boundary between the two big dialect macro-areas is the La Spezia-Rimini line, drawn by Rohlfs in 1937: it separates the northern dialects from the combined Tuscan and central-southern block. A little further south, the Roma-Ancona line marks a second boundary, between the Tuscan area and the central-southern area proper.

The dialects of the northwest, Piedmontese, Lombard, Ligurian and Emilian, have been called Gallo-Italic since the 1800s, for the substrate left behind by the Celtic populations of the area before Roman times. Those of the northeast, Venetan and Istrian, form another recognizable group.

The language question

How Italian became the shared language while regional vernaculars stayed dialects isn’t a story that closed in the Middle Ages: it’s a debate, known as the question of the language, that runs through centuries of Italian literature. Alessandro Manzoni is among the writers most associated with tackling it head-on, rewriting his own novel to bring it closer to the educated spoken Florentine of his day.

With Italian unification, spreading a common language stopped being only a literary concern and became a practical one too: a newly unified country needed a shared language for administration, schools and the press, even as most of the population still relied mainly on dialect at home.

What today’s data shows

According to Istat, the share of the population speaking dialect at home, exclusively or mostly, dropped from 32% in 1988 to 9.6% in 2024. The same report finds that 53.6% of the population says it speaks mostly Italian at home in 2024.

The decline touches the whole peninsula, though the Istat report still points to relatively higher dialect use in parts of southern Italy compared with the national average. Factors commonly cited for a shift this large include schooling that reached every corner of the country, national broadcast media, and the movement of people between regions over the twentieth century; none of these alone accounts for a change of this scale.

The Accademia della Crusca, in a 2025 survey on how dialects are perceived, finds that their use is linked mainly to older speakers, while judgment on the cultural level of those who use them stays neutral. That same year, seventy-four percent of respondents said dialects carry a cultural and identity value that institutions should protect.