The Florentine dialect or vernacular ( or ) is a variety of Tuscan, a

Romance language The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are Language family, directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-E ...

spoken in the Italian city of

Florence Florence ( ; ) is the capital city of the Italy, Italian region of Tuscany. It is also the most populated city in Tuscany, with 362,353 inhabitants, and 989,460 in Metropolitan City of Florence, its metropolitan province as of 2025. Florence ...

and its immediate surroundings. A variant derived from it historically, once called (literally, 'the amended Florentine pronunciation'), was the official

national language '' '' A national language is a language (or language variant, e.g. dialect) that has some connection— de facto or de jure—with a nation. The term is applied quite differently in various contexts. One or more languages spoken as first languag ...

of the

Kingdom of Italy The Kingdom of Italy (, ) was a unitary state that existed from 17 March 1861, when Victor Emmanuel II of Kingdom of Sardinia, Sardinia was proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, proclaimed King of Italy, until 10 June 1946, when the monarchy wa ...

when it was established in 1861. It is the most widely spoken of the Tuscan dialects.

Literature

Important writers such as

Dante Alighieri Dante Alighieri (; most likely baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri; – September 14, 1321), widely known mononymously as Dante, was an Italian Italian poetry, poet, writer, and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', originally called ...

, Francesco Petrarch,

Giovanni Boccaccio Giovanni Boccaccio ( , ; ; 16 June 1313 – 21 December 1375) was an Italian people, Italian writer, poet, correspondent of Petrarch, and an important Renaissance humanism, Renaissance humanist. Born in the town of Certaldo, he became so ...

and, later,

Niccolò Machiavelli Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527) was a Florentine diplomat, author, philosopher, and historian who lived during the Italian Renaissance. He is best known for his political treatise '' The Prince'' (), writte ...

and

Francesco Guicciardini Francesco Guicciardini (; 6 March 1483 – 22 May 1540) was an Italian historian and politician, statesman. A friend and critic of Niccolò Machiavelli, he is considered one of the major political writers of the Italian Renaissance. In his maste ...

wrote in literary Tuscan/Florentine, including Dante's ''

Divine Comedy The ''Divine Comedy'' (, ) is an Italian narrative poetry, narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun and completed around 1321, shortly before the author's death. It is widely considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and one of ...

''. It became a second prestige language alongside Latin and was used as such for centuries.

Differences from Standard Italian

Florentine, and Tuscan more generally, can be distinguished from Standard Italian by differences in numerous features at all levels:

phonology Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines *Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts *Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies, ...

syntax In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituenc ...

and

lexicon A lexicon (plural: lexicons, rarely lexica) is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word () ...

. Perhaps the difference most noticed by Italians and foreigners alike is known as the ''

gorgia toscana The Tuscan gorgia ( , ; 'Tuscan throat') is a phonetic phenomenon governed by a complex of allophonic rules characteristic of the Tuscan dialects, in Tuscany, Italy, especially the central ones, with Florence traditionally viewed as the center. ...

'' (literally 'Tuscan throat'), a consonant-weakening rule widespread in Tuscany in which the

voiceless plosive In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lips ...

phonemes , , are pronounced between vowels as

fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...

s , , respectively. The sequence ''la casa'' 'the house', for example, is pronounced , and ''buco'' 'hole' is realized as . Preceded by a pause or a consonant, is produced as (as in the word ''casa'' alone or in the phrase ''in casa''). Similar alternations obtain for → , and → ,. Strengthening to a

geminate consonant In phonetics and phonology, gemination (; from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), or consonant lengthening, is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...

occurs when the preceding word triggers

syntactic doubling Syntactic gemination, or syntactic doubling, is an external sandhi phenomenon in Italian, other Romance languages spoken in Italy, and Finnish. It consists in the lengthening (gemination) of the initial consonant in certain contexts. It may also ...

(''raddoppiamento fonosintattico'') so the initial consonant of ''pipa'' 'pipe (for smoking)' has three phonetic forms: in spoken as a single word or following a consonant, if preceded by a vowel as in ''la pipa'' 'the pipe' and (also transcribed ) in ''tre pipe'' 'three pipes'. Parallel alternations of the affricates and are also typical of Florentine but by no means confined to it or even to Tuscan. The word ''gelato'' is pronounced with following a pause or a consonant, following a vowel and if ''raddoppiamento'' applies (, ''un gelato'', ''quattro gelati'', ''tre gelati''. Similarly, the initial consonant of ''cena'' 'dinner' has three phonetic forms, , and . In both cases, the weakest variant appears between vowels ( ''regione'' 'region', ''quattro gelati''; ''la cena'', ''bacio'' 'kiss').

Cases

Florentine uses the diminutive case ''-ino/-ine'' far more than Italian does, with many surnames also ending in ''-ini.''

Article and pronouns

Florentine often abbreviates its articles and

pronouns In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( glossed ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not con ...

Unique phrases

The Florentine dialect has several unique phrases as compared the other Tuscan dialects.

Judeo-Florentine

A variety of Florentine known as Judeo-Florentine was spoken by the Jewish community of Florence. It was used in the 19th-century play titled ''La Gnora Luna'', and is now no longer used by Florentine Jews.

References

* *Giacomelli, Gabriella. 1975. Dialettologia toscana. ''Archivio glottologico italiano'' 60, pp. 179-191. *Giannelli, Luciano. 2000. ''Toscana''. (Profilo dei dialetti italiani, 9). Pisa: Pacini. Languages of Italy Florence City colloquials {{romance-lang-stub