The Italian Word Every Language Learner Should Know: “Scoprire” (To Discover)

If there is one Italian word that captures the spirit of language learning, it might be scoprire. To discover. Not to memorize. Not to perform. Not to earn a grade. To discover.

Where Does “Scoprire” come from?

The Italian Language is a Latin Language, meaning it is the Latin Language as it has evolved in a particular area—Italy, in our case. Scoprire comes from the Late Latin (tardo latino) discooperire, made of the pejorative prefix dis- and the verb cooperire (modern Italian for coprire, that is “to cover”). Its original meaning is therefore to “remove the cover”, “uncover”, indeed. Which is, metaphorically, “to discover”. Everyone has their own personal reasons and motivations for learning a language, and the benefits of second-language acquisition—from boosting brain strength, enhancing multitasking, and unlocking deeper cross-cultural awareness—have long been proven. Let’s focus then on the joy of discovery for the sake of it. What’s to be discovered while learning Italian? Scopriamolo! (Let’s discover it!) 

Discovering The Unknown, Authentic Italy

Everyone comes to their first Italian class with a series of ideas about Italy and Italians—from La Dolce Vitato Ferrari, Leonardo da Vinci, and opera—which are not necessarily inaccurate but surely incomplete. The first step to unveil the full picture is to identify and debunk stereotypes and myths. Search for what the currently best-selling cars in Italy are, or stats about the most popular pastimes of Italians are: you’ll see that not everyone owns luxury cars, and opera-going is not so widespread (although there are amazing places to go and enjoy opera!). And, if this is obvious, you still might be surprised to discover which cars Italians drive or what they like to do in their free time.

Discovering How The Italian Language Sounds

Italian sounds very different according to who is speaking! This might look obvious —it’s the same with English accents—but Italy has a peculiar history of dialects, regionalism, accents, and languages other than Italian. Before becoming a single unified country in 1861, Italy was a collection of independent kingdoms, city-states, and territories under foreign control. Spoken languages included a great many dialects, what we know as Italian—used only at the literary and high administrative levels—and several minoranze linguistiche (communities that spoke, and still speak in some cases, languages that are not Italian or Italian dialects). Only 2.5% of Italians used Italian in their everyday lives. And that was true for many years to come. The contemporary Italian language only became widespread after WWII, thanks to the rise of national mass media, increased internal migration, and public schooling. What does all this mean today? That, while Italians learn and can speak a standard language, most of them also know how to speak—or are at least able to understand—a dialect and use a lot of regionalisms. Not to mention accents, which can be confusing even for Italians. Watch some movies, or videos from Italian content creators: you might discover that people talk very differently from your instructor, or from your Italian-heritage relatives!

What’s Left To Discover…

…is up to you. Your personal interests and curiosity should lead you to scoprire, indeed, more about Italy, Italians, and the Italian language. History, art, the language itself with its many nuances, movies, music, podcasts, opera (!), literature, cuisine, internet trends—you name it. What matters most is being driven by a genuine pleasure in learning. No worries, that will eventually lead to better performance (and grades!), but to put it in Aristotele’s words: anche quando non serve, anche quando non è utile, l’uomo ama conoscere (even when you don’t need it, even when it is not useful, the human being loves to know). Buona scoperta!