Learn Italian - Seattle Language School Lessons

Learn Italian at Seattle Language Academy, Seattle:
Seattle Language Academy (SLA) is a non-profit language school in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle.The SLA curriculum consists of a first-year series (101-104), a second-year series (201-204), and, for some languages, advanced reading and conversation classes (300 series).

Email: Contact us here    ( or request a callback )

The Seattle Language Academy emblem is adapted from the heraldic device of the Italian della Rovere family, which produced two famous Renaissance popes: Sixtus IV, who ordered the construction of the Sistine Chapel in the 1480s, and Julius II, who commissioned Michelangelo to decorate it some decades later. For the della Rovere family, the oak tree alluded to their name (rovere is an Italian word for ‘oak’); to the founders of SLA the emblem recommended itself both for its beauty and because – like an oak tree – the learning of a new language is characterized by small beginnings but great promise.

SLA is accredited by NAAS—Northwest Association of Accredited Schools—and on request provides credits and official transcripts for completed coursework.

General Italian Classes; Immersion Italian Courses.

A Romance Language like French, Romanian, Portuguese and Spanish, Italian is spoken by the more than 70,000,000 inhabitants of Italy and is one of the official languages of Switzerland and Ethiopia. While Italy presents a complex mosaic of dialects and regional vernaculars that evolved from Latin over 1000 years ago, modern Italian, based on the Florentine dialect, is spoken by almost all Italians throughout the peninsula. The pre-eminence of the Florentine dialect dates to the late Middle Ages, when such literary giants as Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch used the speech of Florence as the basis for a literary language. But it was only with the upsurge in nationalism in the nineteenth century and the country's subsequent unification that large numbers of Italians began to feel a practical need for a shared language. Over the next century, with the help of print media, public schooling, radio and television, the dialect of Florence would emerge as the national language of Italy.