Italian

Italian is a Romance language spoken by roughly 63m people. Ouside Italy. Other than Italy, Italian is spoken in San Marino, Slovenia, Switzerland, Croatia and the Vatican City (although Latin is the official language of the Vatican).

When translating from English into Italian, the amount of text can expand by up to 25 or even 30% and conversely, Italian to English can contract by the same amount.

There are thousands of English words of Italian origin, especially relating to cuisine, music, literature, art, architecture and politics; some of the lesser known are replica, soda, novel, attack and disaster.

Precipitevolissimevolmente is considered to be the longest Italian word at 26 letters, meaning “as fast as possible”. The longest word in common usage is anticostituzionalmente at 22 letters long meaning “anticonstitutionally”.

Although Italian uses the Latin alphabet, there are only 21 standard letters used in the contemporary version. The letters J, K, W, X and Y are not used except in words loaned from other languages such as “taxi”.

In the Italian version of Scrabble, there are 120 letters and the point value for the letter “U” is 3 and the only 10-point letter is “Q”.