Tuscan Dialect

Tuscan is a group of closely related Italo-Dalmatian Romance varieties spoken in Tuscany, Corsica, and parts of Sardinia, with only minor differences among its local forms. It is native to most of Tuscany, apart from parts of the province of Massa-Carrara, to border areas of western Umbria, to Corsica, and to the Sardinian areas of Gallura and Sassari. Its Florentine form provided the foundation for Standard Italian, since the prestige of Tuscan writers such as Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Francesco Guicciardini elevated Tuscan derived Italian into the primary cultural language of Italy and, eventually, the official language of the historic Italian states and the Kingdom of Italy. Around 3.5 million people speak Tuscan today, not counting the residents of Massa-Carrara and Tuscan Romagna, who speak different dialects. Distinctive features include the Tuscan gorgia, which turns certain stop consonants into fricative sounds, the softening of affricate consonants between vowels, and grammatical quirks such as an emphatic accusative form of the pronoun te and the loss of the infinitive ending re.