Reading Italian

Italian spelling is nearly as faithful as Spanish. Its vowels are pure and full, and almost every word ends in one. Three things need learning: c and g change sound with the next letter, using h and i as silent switches; double consonants are really pronounced long; and stressed e and o come in two qualities, open and close.

The c and g switches

Double consonants: hold them

A written double consonant in Italian is genuinely longer — linguists call it gemination. For stops (pp, tt, cc), hold the closure a beat before releasing; for continuous sounds (ss, ll, nn, mm, rr), stretch the sound. The vowel before a double consonant is short; the vowel before a single one, if stressed, is long. Get it wrong and you say a different word. Some sounds are always long between vowels even with a single letter: figlio [ˈfiʎʎo], bagno [ˈbaɲɲo], pesce [ˈpeʃʃe], azione [atˈtsjone]. No other sister keeps Latin's long consonants as a system; the nearest echo is Catalan l·l, a long l in careful speech, found mostly in learned words (col·legi, il·lusió).

Open and close e, o

In stressed syllables Italian distinguishes close e, o [e o] from open è, ò [ɛ ɔ]. The difference can separate words — pesca [ˈpɛska] 'peach' / pesca [ˈpeska] 'fishing', venti [ˈvɛnti] 'winds' / venti [ˈventi] 'twenty', botte [ˈbɔtte] 'blows' / botte [ˈbotte] 'barrel' — but spelling does not show it, and regional accents distribute the vowels differently. Aim for the standard, but don't lose sleep: context almost always resolves it. Portuguese and Catalan make the same distinction and show it whenever they write an accent: Portuguese avô [aˈvo] 'grandfather' / avó [aˈvɔ] 'grandmother', Catalan també [təmˈbe] 'also' / cafè [kəˈfɛ] 'coffee'. Spanish and Romanian do without it.

Where the stress falls

Most Italian words are parole piane, stressed on the second-to-last syllable: casa, parlare, amico. A large minority are parole sdrucciole, stressed on the third-from-last — tavolo, musica, macchina, telefono — and nothing in the spelling warns you; verbs add more (parlano [ˈparlano] 'they speak'). Only parole tronche, stressed on the final vowel, carry a written accent: città, caffè, perché, però, università. The accent is grave on most vowels (à, è, ì, ò, ù) and acute on close é (perché, né). It also tells apart short words: è 'is' / e 'and', là 'there' / la 'the', sì 'yes' / si 'oneself', dà 'gives' / da 'from'.