<P> Italian literature's first modern novel, I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), by Alessandro Manzoni, further defined the standard by "rinsing" his Milanese "in the waters of the Arno" (Florence's river), as he states in the Preface to his 1840 edition . </P> <P> After unification, a huge number of civil servants and soldiers recruited from all over the country introduced many more words and idioms from their home languages ("ciao" is derived from Venetian word "s - cia (v) o" (slave), "panettone" comes from Lombard word "panetton" etc .). Only 2.5% of Italy's population could speak the Italian standardized language properly when the nation was unified in 1861 . </P> <P> Italian is a Romance language, and is therefore a descendant of Vulgar Latin (the spoken form of non-classical Latin). Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, especially its Florentine dialect, and is therefore an Italo - Dalmatian language, to which Sicilian and the extinct Dalmatian also belong, among a few others . </P> <P> Unlike most other Romance languages, Italian retains Latin's contrast between short and long consonants . As in most Romance languages, stress is distinctive . In particular, among the Romance languages, Italian is the closest to Latin in terms of vocabulary . Lexical similarity is 89% with French, 88% with Catalan, 85% with Sardinian, 82% with Spanish and Portuguese, 78% with Rhaeto - Romance, and 77% with Romanian . </P>

Standard italian is the version of the language spoken in
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