Italy boasts 12 aptly called ‘historical language communities,’ and countless more dialects and variations. With Italian often regarded as the Latin legacy, it is not widely known that there actually exist languages which resemble the Roman forefather even more than the romantic and notoriously melodical lingua we are familiar with. In fact, Italy is home to numerous linguistic cousins of its national language

Although Italian is the national lingua franca, these minority languages are generally valued and respected. Rather than being pushed to the peripheries as is sometimes the case in other countries, these languages often mix with Italian to create what linguists call a ‘diglossia‘: a unique back-and-forth, mixed use of both languages. This can mean switching between sentences, speaking one language with some vocabulary or expressions from the other, and generally an unconscious and natural oscillation between the two.