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Italy's
Trends, Travel Tips and  Culinary Traditions
Region by Region
Regional Languages of Italy
(and their dialects)
The largest group of non-Italian speakers (some 1.6 million people) are the ones who speak Sardinian (Sardo, Sardu) - romance language. Four dialects of Sardinian can be distinguished: Gallurese Sardinian, Logudorese Sardinian, Campidanese Sardinian, and Sassarese Sardinian.

Another quite large community of some 350,000 people in Friuli speak Friulian, another Rhaeto-romanic language, spoken in the Udine Province, extending to Gorizia and the Venezia provinces.

Further regional languages include:

References and Further reading:
Dictionary of Languages by Andrew Dalby
La Lingua Italiana by Maurizio Dardano and Pietro Trifone
Ethnologue
Due to its long history of strongly independent regional identities, until its relatively recent unification in 1861, Italy has kept a wide variety of regional languages, some of which have gained official recognition (like Sardinian).
See also:
Extinct and dead languages of Italy
Minority languages of Italy

Italian loanwords in English
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