Florentine dialect
The Florentine dialect or vernacular is a variety of Tuscan, a Romance language spoken in the Italian city of Florence and its immediate surroundings.
A variant derived from it historically, once called la pronuncia fiorentina emendata, was the official 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, including 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, 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 . Similar alternations obtain for →, and →,.
Strengthening to a geminate consonant occurs when the preceding word triggers syntactic doubling so the initial consonant of pipa 'pipe ' 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 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.
| Florentine | 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/semo¹ | 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'ha | tu 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 | loro hanno | they have |
¹Notice that the form semo directly comes from Vulgar Latin *sēmus, a form shared throughout most languages of Italy together with som~son, from the original Latin sumus. Despite this, cultured Florentine displaced all the original 1st person plural present forms with the subjunctive of the 3rd conjugation, so that andamo, cademo, sentimo have all changed to andiamo, cadiamo, sentiamo.
Cases
Florentine uses the diminutive case -ino/-ine far more than Italian does, with many surnames also ending in -ini.| Italian | Florentine | English |
| belle | belline | lovely |
| povere | poverine/poerine | poor |
| poche | pochine/pohine | little |
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.| Florentine | English |
| maremma | damnit |
| trombaio | plumber |
| icchè tu sei grullo? | are you stupid? |
| smettila, se no tu ne buschi | stop it, or I will beat you |
| acquai | kitchen sink |
| sei un boccalone | you have a big mouth |
| babbo | dad/father |