The Florentine dialect or vernacular ( or ) is a variety of Tuscan, a Romance language spoken in the Italian city of Florence and its immediate surroundings.
A received pedagogical variant derived from it historically, once called (literally, 'the amended Florentine pronunciation'), was officially prescribed as the national language of the Kingdom of Italy, when it was established in 1861.
Literature
Important writers such as Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio and, later, Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini wrote in literary Tuscan/Florentine, perhaps the best-known example being Dante's Divine Comedy.
Differences from Standard Italian
Florentine, and Tuscan more generally, can be distinguished from Standard Italian by differences in numerous features at all levels: phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon.
Perhaps the difference most noticed by Italians and foreigners alike is known as the gorgia toscana (literally 'Tuscan throat'), a consonant-weakening rule widespread in Tuscany in which the voiceless plosive phonemes , , are pronounced between vowels as fricatives , , respectively. The sequence la casa 'the house', for example, is pronounced , and buco 'hole' is realized as . Preceded by a pause or a consonant, is produced as (as in the word casa alone or in the phrase in casa). Similar alternations obtain for → , and → ,.
Strengthening to a geminate consonant occurs when the preceding word triggers syntactic doubling (raddoppiamento fonosintattico) so the initial consonant of pipa 'pipe (for smoking)' has three phonetic forms: in spoken as a single word or following a consonant, if preceded by a vowel as in la pipa 'the pipe' and (also transcribed ) in tre pipe 'three pipes'.
Parallel alternations of the affricates and are also typical of Florentine but by no means confined to it or even to Tuscan. The word gelato is pronounced with following a pause or a consonant, following a vowel and if raddoppiamento applies (, un gelato, quattro gelati, tre gelati. Similarly, the initial consonant of cena 'dinner' has three phonetic forms, , and . In both cases, the weakest variant appears between vowels ( regione 'region', quattro gelati; la cena, bacio 'kiss').
Examples: (Florentine dialect, standard Italian, English):
Io sòn = io sono = I am
Te tu sei = tu sei = you are
Egli l'è = egli è = he/she/it is
Noi s'è/semo = noi siamo = we are
Voi vù siete = voi siete = you are
Essi l'enno = essi sono = they are
Io c'ho = io ho = I have
Te tu c'hai = te hai = you have
Egli c'ha = egli ha = he/she/it has
Noi ci s'ha = noi abbiamo = we have
Voi vù c'avete = voi avete = you have
Essi c'hanno = essi hanno = they have
Source:
References
Giacomelli, Gabriella. 1975. Dialettologia toscana. Archivio glottologico italiano 60, pp. 179-191. Giannelli, Luciano. 2000. Toscana. (Profilo dei dialetti italiani, 9). Pisa: Pacini.