standard italian is the version of the language spoken in
Italian language Italian is a Romance language, and is therefore a descendant of Vulgar Latin (the spoken form of non-classical Latin).[note 1] Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, especially its Florentine dialect, and is therefore an Italo-Dalmatian language, to which Sicilian and the extinct Dalmatian also belong, among a few others.
Languages of the Roman Empire After the decentralization of political power in late antiquity, Latin developed locally in the Western provinces into branches that became the Romance languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian. In the early 21st century, the first or second language of more than a billion people derived from Latin.[14] Latin itself remained an international medium of expression for diplomacy and for intellectual developments identified with Renaissance humanism up to the 17th century, and for law and the Roman Catholic Church to the present.