What is the Italian in English?

Italian (italiano [itaˈljaːno]) is a Romance language spoken as a first language by around 60 million people in Italy, San Marino, Vatican City, Istria and Ticino. It is also spoken by several million people more in other countries, especially in the Americas and Europe. It belongs to the Italo-Western Romance sub-branch of the Romance language family.

Italian is the official language of Italy, San Marino, Switzerland (along with Romansh, German and French) and Vatican City (along with Latin). It is also one of the official languages of Istria (along with Croatian and Slovene).

Italian is a relatively close language to Spanish, French and Portuguese, with significant mutual intelligibility. The written form of Italian is also quite close to that of Romanian, despite there being much less mutual intelligibility between spoken Romanian and Italian.