Italian (Italiano) is a Romance language currently spoken by some 66,000,000 people, of whom the vast majority live in peninsular Italy (including the Republic of San Marino). France, including Corsica, has about 260,000 Italian speakers and Switzerland more than 500,000 (the canton of Ticino). For a large, if decreasing, proportion of these speakers, standard Italian is not the language of the home, where dialectal forms are used.
