Do you speak Italian??...no, the real Italian

When I was 10 or so years old, I can remember my mother and father debating, or you could call it arguing, about who spoke the purest Italian. My mother's family was from Piedmont and my father's was from Tuscany. Although this discussion was always great sport, I never paid much attention to it. As it turned out, my mother spoke a dialect and my father believed he spoke a more refined version, or as he would say, educated version of Italian. And so it went, like so many arguments about this or that from this or that region of Italy being the best etc etc., some things never change.

Today I ran upon a mention of Itakian, a Italian dialect which combines Italian and Hebrew. I had never heard of this. It got me thinking, how many dialects are spoken in Italy??

The answer is, a lot.

I won't bore you with a list but check out the link, I think it will amaze you. It is easy to think of Italy as a unified country with one language but in reality it is one country with many languages and dialects and still changing today.