Geographical distribution of Italian speakers

This article details the geographical distribution of speakers of the Italian language, regardless of the legislative status within the countries where it is spoken.

[60] But throughout the world, Italian is the fifth most taught foreign language, after English, French, German, and Spanish.

[61] In the European Union statistics, Italian is spoken as a native language by 13% of the EU population, or 65 million people,[62] mainly in Italy.

Among EU states, the percentage of people able to speak Italian well enough to have a conversation is 66% in Malta, 15% in Slovenia, 14% in Croatia, 8% in Austria, 5% in France and Luxembourg, and 4% in the former West Germany, Greece, Cyprus, and Romania.

Italian is generally understood in Corsica by the population resident therein who speak Corsican, which is an Italo-Romance idiom similar to Tuscan.

[79][80] Ligurian is recognized as a regional language in the French department of the Alpes-Maritimes, furthermore, there is an autochthonous Italian population dating from the Savoyard Kingdom of Sardinia, which controlled the area until 1860, the year the Treaty of Turin entered into force, regardless the more recent Italian immigrants of the twentieth century.

[82] Italian formerly had official status in parts of Greece (because of the Venetian rule in the Ionian Islands and by the Kingdom of Italy in the Dodecanese).

[83] Italian served as Malta's official language until 1934, when it was abolished by the British colonial administration amid strong local opposition.

[86] Outside former colonies, Italian is also understood and spoken in Tunisia and Egypt by a small part of the population.

[89] Nevertheless, Italian continues to be used in economic sectors in Libya, and today it is the most spoken second language in the country.

[91][92] In Canada, Italian is the second most spoken non-official language when varieties of Chinese are not grouped together, with over 660,000 speakers (or about 2.1% of the population) according to the 2006 Census.

[93] In Costa Rica, Central America, Italian is one of the most important immigration community languages, after English.

It is spoken in the southern area of the country in cities like San Vito[94] and other communities of Coto Brus, near the south borderline with Panama.

Its impact can also be seen in the Portuguese prosody of the Brazilian state of São Paulo, which itself has 15 million Italian descendants.