The world's most musical language, Italian, is spoken by approximately 58 million people in Italy, 24,000 in San Marino, 840,000 in Switzerland, and roughly 5 million in North and South America. There are small areas within in Libya and Somalia as well, both former Italian colonies.

The Italian language is a member of the Romance group of the Italic branch of the Indo-European family. It is primarily spoken in the Italy, southern Switzerland, San Marino, Sicily, Corsica, northern Sardinia, and on the north-eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea. It is termed as a one language with numerous dialects. Italian, simialr to other Romance languages, is the direct offspring of the Latin spoken by the Romans and forced to be spoken by the peoples under the Roman's rule.

When comparing all the primary romance languages, Italian retains the most similarities to Latin. The struggle between the written but dead language and the various forms of the living speech, most of which were derived from Vulgar Latin, was nowhere so intense or protracted as in Italy.