Foreign Languages & Literatures

Why Study Italian?

A variety of motives lead people to choose to study Italian language and culture:

•  As a language that derived from Latin, students in medical/scientific and legal fields can gain valuable insight into the root words and meanings of terms in their respective disciplines; most anatomical/scientific and legal, terms have close relatives in Italian, such as, arteria, vertebra , stomaco, intestino , ibrido , mercurio, tribunale, ipotesi, legale, giudiziario…

•  Artistic fields have drawn much from Italian culture, so the areas of music, visual arts, poetry, culinary studies, have all been beneficiaries; that gives currency to words like allegro, crescendo, orchestra, basilica, terra cotta, cupola, stanza, ottava, terzina, spaghetti, tortellini, cannoli…,

•  In some ways, as Chaucer is to English, Dante is to Italian: both writers gave these once marginalized, “vulgar” languages a place of honor within their literary canons and vaulted them into positions of respected status. For Italian, that status was further cemented by literary masterpieces by Petrarch, Boccaccio and others.

•  Unlike Latin, Italian is a living language with antique and modern traces, spoken today by almost 200,000 people as a first or second language; as such, it is a language of interest to travelers who desire to be more than tourists.

•  Italy is a popular destination because of its immense variety—rocky, sandy, and cliffside beaches, rolling hillsides, the Alps and Apennines, fertile plains, cities steeped in architectural and artistic history, and a culinary inheritance as regional and wide-ranging as the people who inhabit the Italian peninsula; further, it has been estimated that 40% of the cultural riches of the world reside in Italy.

•  Many people study Italian because of its melodic, musical sound; because it is a phonetic language, Italian pronunciation is relatively easy.

•  Italian is the second most studied foreign language in Canada and fourth in the USA and the UK .

•  Modern Italy was one of the founding nations of the European Union and is a member of the G8, the group of some of the most industrialized nations in the world; thus, Italian is an important language of commerce in fields such as Formula 1 car racing (e.g., Ferrari), fashion and design (e.g., Armani, Gucci, Damiani, Natuzzi,), and food industry (Barilla, Bertolli).

Italian is a language and culture studied for many reasons, including discovering more about one's heritage. After thorough study, students can also decide to teach it, become tourist guides, interpreters, or translators.

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