English and Italian are two different languages that offer two very different ways of expressing thoughts. While Italian is known for its fluency, English is characterized by its complexity. The Italian language is spoken by about 85 million people around the world. It is the mother tongue of 65 million people, most of whom are from Italy. The rest treat it as their second language. English, on the other hand, is spoken by about 500 million people. Aside from the US, the largest numbers of English speakers are found in India, Nigeria, the UK, the Philippines, Canada, and Australia.
But in what other ways is Italian different from English?
Difference in language family
Italian is a Romance language, which is one of the Indo-European language families. It is the modern language that most closely resembles Latin. In fact, there are numerous similarities between the two languages. Being a Romance language, it shares many characteristics with other Romance languages such as Spanish (82% lexically similar) and French (89% lexically similar).
Meanwhile, English had its roots in the Anglo-Saxons in England. As a member of the Germanic language family, it is closely related to the German, Dutch, Frisian, and Afrikaans languages.
difference in alphabet
Although they share the same 26 letters of the English alphabet, the letters j, k, w, x, and y are seen as foreign letters and as such are used only to import words. Also, words that are considered proper nouns in English and are capitalized, such as names of months, days, and others, are not capitalized in Italian.
Difference in sounds and spelling.
In Italian, the spelling is phonetic with very few exceptions to the rules and no silent letters. This is different from English, where the use of silent letters is practiced and spelling is more complicated. Also, vowels in Italian are pronounced precisely, in contrast to the use of diphthongized vowels in English.
difference in grammar
Like other Romance languages, Italian assigns genders to nouns. Nouns are feminine or masculine. Modifiers and items must match the number and gender of the subject. This is not the case in English, since nouns are generally genderless and modifiers do not have to match.
The two languages also differ in verb conjugation. Italian uses 5 verb forms, namely Past Simple, Present, Future, Imperfect and Conditional. Use auxiliaries to form other tenses and change verb endings to express the tense and the subject. In English, verbs often retain their original forms. Their meanings are distinguished by the use of suffixes such as -ed, -es or -ing and auxiliaries such as “will” or “would”.
In English, the meaning of a sentence depends on the order of the words. Italian, being an influenced language, allows more flexibility in sentence structure. Also, adjectives in English go before the noun; in Italian they come after the noun.
There are other differences between the Italian and English languages. In general, while English is a complex language, Italian is a language of simplicity, fluency, and deference.
