Regional Italian (, ) is any regional variety of the Italian language. Such vernacular varieties and standard Italian exist along a sociolect continuum, and are not to be confused with the local indigenous languages of Italy that predate the national tongue or any regional variety thereof. Among these languages, the various Tuscan, Corsican and Central Italian lects are, to some extent, the closest ones to standard Italian in terms of linguistic features, since the latter is based on a somewhat polished form of Florentine. The various forms of Regional Italian have phonological, morphological, syntactic, prosodic and lexical features which originate from the underlying substrate of the original language. Regional Italian and the languages of Italy The difference between Regional Italian and the actual languages of Italy, often imprecisely referred to as dialects, is exemplified by the following: in Venetian, the language spoken in Veneto, "we are arriving" would be translated into , which is quite distinct from the Standard Italian . In the regional Italian of Veneto, the same expression would be stémo rivando or siamo dietro ad arrivare. The same relationship holds throughout the rest of Italy: the local version of standard Italian is usually influenced by the underlying local language, which can be very different from Italian with regard to phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary. Anyone who knows Standard Italian well can usually understand Regional Italian quite well, while not managing to grasp the regional languages. Origin Many contemporary Italian regions already had different substrata before the conquest of Italy and the islands by the ancient Romans: Northern Italy had a Ligurian, a Venetic, and a Celtic substratum in the areas once known as Gallia Cisalpina "Gallia on this side of the Alps"; Central Italy had an Umbrian and Etruscan substratum; Southern Italy and Sicily had an Oscan and Italic-Greek substratum respectively; and finally, Sardinia had an indigenous (Nuragic) and Punic substratum. These languages in their respective territories contributed in creolising Latin, the official language of the Roman Empire. Even though the Sicilian School, using the Sicilian language, had been prominent earlier, by the 14th century the Tuscan dialect of Florence had gained prestige once Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) and Giovanni Boccaccio all wrote major works in it: the Divina Commedia, the Canzoniere and the Decameron. Italian, defined as such, began to spread and be used as a literary and prestigious means of expression across the whole