the language but to study its history, usage, literature and social role. There are also ongoing legislative attempts at the national level to have it recognized as an official minority language of Italy. It is a recognized ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee language with the language code of nap. Here is the IPA pronunciation of the Neapolitan spoken in the city of Naples: Alphabet and pronunciation Neapolitan orthography consists of 22 Latin letters. Much like Italian orthography, it does not contain k, w, x, or y even though these letters might be found in some foreign words; unlike Italian, it does contain the letter j. The following English pronunciation guidelines are based on General American pronunciation, and the values used may not apply to other dialects. (See also: International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects.) All Romance languages are closely related. Although Neapolitan shares a high degree of its vocabulary with Italian, the official language of Italy, differences in pronunciation often make the connection unrecognizable to those without knowledge of Neapolitan. The most striking phonological difference is the Neapolitan weakening of unstressed vowels into schwa (schwa is pronounced like the a in about or the u in upon). However, it is also possible (and quite common for some Neapolitans) to speak standard Italian with a "Neapolitan accent"; that is, by pronouncing un-stressed vowels as schwa or by pronouncing the letter s as (like the sh in ship) instead of (like the s in sea or the ss in pass) when the letter is in initial position followed by a consonant, but not when it is followed by a dental occlusive or (at least in the purest form of the language) but by otherwise using only entirely standard words and grammatical forms. This is not Neapolitan properly, but rather a mere difference in Italian pronunciation. Therefore, while pronunciation presents the strongest barrier to comprehension, the grammar of Neapolitan is what sets it apart from Italian. In Neapolitan, for example, the gender and number of a word is expressed by a change in the accented vowel, whereas in Italian it is expressed by a change in the final vowel (e.g. luongo , longa ; Italian lungo, lunga; masc. "long", fem. "long"). These and other morpho-syntactic differences distinguish the Neapolitan language from the Italian language and the Neapolitan accent. Neapolitan has had a significant influence on the intonation of Rioplatense Spanish, of the