The Florentine dialect or vernacular (dialetto fiorentino or vernacolo fiorentino) 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 la pronuncia fiorentina emendata (literally, 'the amended Florentine pronunciation'), was officially prescribed as the national language of the Kingdom of Italy, when it was established in 1861. It is the most widely spoken of the Tuscan dialects.

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. It became a second prestige language alongside Latin and was used as such for centuries.

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').

Cases

Florentine uses the diminutive case -ino/-ine far more than Italian does, with many surnames also ending in -ini.

Article and pronouns

Florentine often abbreviates its articles and pronouns.

Unique phrases

The Florentine dialect has several unique phrases as compared the other Tuscan dialects.

Dialects

A dialect of Florentine known as Judeo-Florentine was spoken by the Jewish community of Florence.