<h2>Italian interpreters and translators</h2>
            CIT offers Italian interpreters and translators with legal, medical and specialty experience, including criminal and civil matters, employee meetings, engineering, patent cases, labor disputes, immigration and more.

            Although based in Los Angeles, CIT offers comprehensive Italian language services including interpretation, translation and transcription, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, worldwide. Our interpreters and translators are native speakers who have been screened, certified, have provided credentials, field tested, and kept up to date with developments in both English and the Italian language through means such as lectures, conferences, and travel. CIT’s Italian language interpreters and translators possess in depth knowledge of the Italian language, as well as of the culture and history of the Italian people, allowing them to provide informed and complete interpretation and translation.
            <h2>The Italian Language</h2>
            The Italian language comes from Latin, like other Romance languages. Approximately 63 million people speak Italian as a first language, while another 3 million speak it as a second language. It is the 20<sup>th</sup> most spoken language in the world. The Italian language as we know it today has been developed through a long and slow process overtime, beginning in the 5<sup>th</sup> century after the end of the Roman Empire. Before that, Latin had been the madre franca, the shared language, of the Empire. When the Roman Empire fell, there words changed because there had been an important role for the language before the fall.

            During the middle ages, Latin was the main language and was used in European universities and for all official procedures of the Church. The first recorded documents in Italian were dated back to the year 960. These documents were called the Paciti Capuani. They prove that some territories near the city of Capua belonged to the Benedictine monks. In the early 1200s, there was a lot of literature and poems that began to be written and published in Italian. Some of the popular authors were Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio and Francesco Petrarch.

            Before the Unification of Italy in 1861, Italy became divided. After, Tuscan became the official language. Until around the 1950s, many Italians were illiterate, particularly in the rural regions. Different dialects in Italian can indicate different ways of speaking or social levels, even among family and friends. Even today, many dialects are used, among the younger and older generations alike. Dialects, along with accents, can be different even in the same region of Italy. For many years, it was thought that different dialects of Italian indicated poverty or impoverished areas. However, it is believed that the reality of dialects is that they are in fact, enriching! Many regional terms from places like Naples, Sicily, Lombardy, Veneto and Tuscany have been added to the lexicon of the Italian language.

            In 1950, as Italy was continuing to rebuild after World War II, it is said that less than 20% of the Italian population spoke the language fluently on a day to day basis. In 1948, when the Italian constitution was established, it gave everyone the right to education. Considering that a large amount of Italians were illiterate or semi-illiterate, this was a big step. Some people attribute the unification of the language due to television.

            The Italian language is rich with many words. However, a famous Italian linguist Tullio De Mauro (1932-2017) deduced that around half of Italians used only 3000 words on a daily basis. The Italian Linguistic Academy, the Academia della Crusca, based in Medici Villa of Costello in Firenze, is where the Italian language is registered.

            The Italian language, since Italy became a republic in 1946, has many loanwords., particularly from French, English and German. After World War II up until the 1970s, French was the only other language taught in schools. Around the same time, through music, television and other culture, English became quite popular in Italy as well.