Language code: it

Technical information about ISO 639 language code it

The table below provides technical details for the Italian language, designated by the it code from the ISO 639-1 standard.

Code

it

Name

Official

Italian

Native

Italiano

Family
Romance
Text direction

Left-to-Right

Plural rules

More info

Language varieties
Northern ItalianCentral Italian (Tuscan–Roman)Southern Italian
Related languages
SpanishFrenchCatalanOccitanPortuguese
Key facts
Modern Standard Italian is rooted in the Tuscan of Dante and other 14th-century writersIt uniquely preserves a strong contrast between single and double (geminate) consonants among major Romance languagesMany international music, culinary and fashion terms originate from ItalianThe language keeps a seven-vowel system that closely mirrors Classical LatinThe earliest known Italian vernacular texts, the Placiti Cassinesi, were written in 960 CE
Sample phrase

Ciao, come stai?

Character encodings

ISO 8859-1, ISO 8859-15, Windows 1252, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32

Supported in Localizely

Italian belongs to the Indo-European language family, more precisely to the Romance subgroup. It is the official language of Italy, San Marino, and Vatican City, and is one of the four national languages of Switzerland, specifically serving as an official language in the canton of Ticino and parts of the canton of Graubünden. Italian is written using the Latin script (Italian alphabet). It is estimated that there are more than 65 million speakers worldwide.

Language presence globally

*The graph shows a rough estimate of Italian speakers in countries where it is an official or minority language.

Related locale codes

it-CH Italian (Switzerland)

it-IT Italian (Italy)

it-SM Italian (San Marino)

it-VA Italian (Vatican)

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