II.

Origins

During the long period of the evolution of Italian, many dialects sprang up. In the north and northwest the Gallo-Italian dialects predominate; they are Piedmontese, Lombard, Ligurian, and Emilian or Bolognese, all of which display a close affinity to French in their pronunciation and truncated terminations. The Venetian dialect is spoken in the Italian Tirol and parts of what used to be Dalmatia and Istria, in addition to the Venetian area itself. South of these districts the centrosouthern Italian dialects are found; these are Tuscan, Corsican, north Sardinian, Roman (with which are included the closely related dialects of Umbria and The Marches), Campanian (with which are included Abruzzese and Apulian), Sicilian, and Calabrian. South and central Sardinian dialects are so distinct from this entire group of dialects that they constitute a separate branch of the Romance languages, while an Italian dialect of the Eastern Alps, Friulian, which is spoken in northeastern Venetia, is considered by most linguists to be a Rhaeto-Romanic dialect.