4. An American was hitchhiking in Italy and got picked up by an Italian truck driver. The American spoke no Italian, but was fluent in Spanish. He and the truck driver (who spoke no English or Spanish) had a lively conversation for two hours: the American was speaking Spanish, and the truck driver was speaking Italian. At the end of the trip, the truck driver asked the American which dialect of Italian he was speaking. What does this tell you about the difference between the dialects of Spanish and Italian spoken by these two people as language varieties?

To start with, we can assume that the American doesn´t speak a Spanish dialect, because dialects are generally spoken by minorities in their own home country. The reason why the truck driver believes the American speaks an Italian dialect is simple: it´s due to the fact that Spanish is a Latin lenguage, i.e. the lenguage spoken by the Romans (first only in Rome, then all over Italy during the beginning of the Roman Republic and by 117 AD the Roman Empire and it´s lenguage was all over Europe). The similarity of Spanish and Italian is a bit like Dutch and German, because Dutch has German roots, whereas Spanish has Latin roots.