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						Italian is a Romance language spoken by some 70 million people, of which about 56 million live in Italy. Literature in Italian developed later than French and Occitan literature, and standard Italian started to fix during the 15th c. in the works by Dante Alighieri, who used a mixture of the Tuscan dialect and southern dialects, especially Sicilian. (In these days, this standard is being slowly modified by the Milanese dialect, spoken in the economical capital of Italy, Milan.) During subsequent centuries, Italian grew into a cultural language. Among Romance languages, Italian is closest to Latin. Italian features the traits common to all Romance languages. In particular, it lost noun declension but kept a rich verb system, featuring a variety of tenses. Most Italian verbs are regular. Unlike most Romance languages, in Italian there are long vowels.
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