Italo-Australian is an

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...

n-based dialect of

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance languag ...

that is spoken by Australians of Italian descent.

Characteristics

The exact number of speakers is unknown, but it is highly speculated that the language is mainly spoken by the younger generations, passed on by the elder ancestors, who created the language. Some researchers think that the dialect might have been spoken by nearly 900,000 Italian Australians in 2012.

Origin

The foundation of this dialect is modern

, which was brought to Australia following the

Italian diaspora The Italian diaspora (, ) is the large-scale emigration of Italians from Italy. There were two major Italian diasporas in Italian history. The first diaspora began around 1880, two decades after the Risorgimento, Unification of Italy, and ended ...

in the post World War I era. It wasn't until the years after the second diaspora after

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

that the dialect came into note. The language was simply created with modern Italian words being influenced by the vocabulary of the

English language English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a English as a lingua franca, global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles (tribe), Angles, one of the Germanic peoples th ...

, to create Italian/English words. Some words follow the rules of Italian spelling, changing to an English one only with a few character changes to make it sound Italian.Tullio De Mauro. "Storia Della Lingua Italiana" (p.102)

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

Tullio De Mauro has noted the dialect in his famous book 'Storia Della Lingua' as "developing dialect that is still enduring the modern influences of English". De Mauro also claims the language is growing with the vocabulary being passed onto the younger generations of

Italian Australian Italian Australians () are Australian-born citizens who are fully or partially of Italian descent, whose ancestors were Italians who emigrated to Australia during the Italian diaspora, or Italian-born people in Australia. Italian Australia ...

Example words

References

{{Italian people Dialects of Italian

Languages of Australia Italian-Australian culture Romance languages in Oceania

Characteristics

Origin

Example words

See also

References