World Language Map

Where is Italian spoken?

Italian (italiano) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, the United States and 11 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Italian is spoken

Italian is spoken in 15 countries: Italy, Germany, Switzerland, the United States and 11 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Italy95%57,916,655
Germany7%5,888,337
Switzerland15%1,329,086
United States0.3%1,162,674
France1.7%1,162,368
Austria9%807,118
Brazil0.3%616,146
Canada1.5%581,922
Australia1.9%508,603
Malta56%263,049
United Kingdom0.2%136,918
Croatia1.6%66,402
San Marino89%31,235
Slovenia0.2%3,986
Vatican City82%820

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Italian is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Italian.

How many people speak Italian?

Wikidata gives about 64.8 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). It also lists about 3 million second-language speakers (ethnologue.com, 2009). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Italian sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Italian as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Italic
  4. Latino-Faliscan
  5. Latinic
  6. Imperial Latin
  7. Romance
  8. Italo-Western Romance
  9. Italo-Dalmatian
  10. Italian Romance
  11. Central Italian Romance
  12. Italian

More about Italian

Codes: ISO 639-3 ita, Glottolog ital1282. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Italian is a Romance language, descended from Latin. Latin’s footprint: the Roman Empire at its height → Latin spread along Roman roads →

Questions about Italian

Where is Italian spoken?

Italian is spoken in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, the United States and 11 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 95% of the population of Italy, which is about 57,916,655 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Italian?

Wikidata gives about 64.8 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled. It also lists about 3 million second-language speakers (ethnologue.com, 2009).

Which language family is Italian in?

Glottolog places Italian in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Italic, Latino-Faliscan, Latinic, Imperial Latin, Romance, Italo-Western Romance, Italo-Dalmatian, Italian Romance and Central Italian Romance.

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