(updated in August 2026)
A year ago I sat down to a very late and long dinner in a small town in the south with some local Italians, and for the first hour I was doing fine with my level of Italian.
Then as the dinner progressed, everyone relaxed, and the table switched into a series of words and expressions that I couldn’t recognize.. It took me a minute to realise that I was not going crazy; they were speaking a dialect. I went from participating to listening and watching, wondering if I could learn a dialect by just being in the environment.
Nobody was excluding me on purpose. In fact, they just hadn’t realized it themselves. They had stopped speaking the language they use with outsiders and started speaking the one they use with each other.
I’m writing about this because the usual question about moving to Italy is whether people will be able to understand you. That question is of course important.
The more useful question, though, is slightly different, and it has a harder answer: whether you will be able to be part of things.
What the English proficiency numbers actually show
Italy does not score well on English, and Puglia scores less well than Italy as a whole..
In the 2025 edition of the EF English Proficiency Index, Italy ranked 59th of 123 countries and territories, down from 46th the previous year, with the lowest score in the European Union. Within Italy the variation is wide. Friuli Venezia Giulia scored 553 and Emilia Romagna 534, while Puglia scored 498, Sardinia 491 and Calabria 482.
That places Puglia in EF’s “low proficiency” band, and third from the bottom among Italian regions.
The index has real limitations, and they are worth stating. EF’s test takers are self-selected, which means the sample is drawn from people motivated enough to sit an online English test. If anything, that tends to flatter a region rather than the reverse.
Italy’s own statistics agency reaches a similar place by a different route. ISTAT’s 2026 report on language use, covering 2024, found that 58.6% of people aged six and over say they know English, up more than ten points since 2015.
The level, though, is the part that matters. Across the country, 56.2% describe their command of their best foreign language as poor or merely adequate. In the Mezzogiorno, only 35.8% rate themselves good or excellent, against 46.9% in the Centre-North.
Now this doesn’t mean that you will struggle to order dinner or buy a train ticket. It means the pool of people who can hold a complicated conversation with you in English is considerably smaller than a week in Lecce in August would suggest.
The age gap matters more than the regional one
Here is the figure that changed how I think about this.
Proficiency levels follow the same pattern. Around six in ten people aged fifteen to thirty-four describe their level as good or excellent, compared with roughly one in four among the over-sixty-fives.
For someone moving to Italy at sixty-five, this may be a bit tricky. The waiter, the estate agent and the doctor’s receptionist are quite likely to speak some English. The person your own age at the next table, the one you might actually become friends with, is the least likely of any other local to be able to communicate with you in a common language that you and they share.
The situatio is improving though, and quickly. Among the over-sixty-fives, knowledge of at least one foreign language rose by 14.3 points in ten years, and among those aged fifty-five to sixty-four it rose by 14.2 points. The cohort retiring in Puglia in twenty years will be far more multilingual than today’s.
That is great progress, although this is not of much help to you if you are planning to arrive in Italy next spring.
Dialect is the part that rarely gets mentioned
Italian is not the only language in the room, and in the south it is often not the main one.
In the Mezzogiorno, with the exception of Sardinia and Abruzzo, more than half the population aged six and over uses dialect at home, either exclusively or alongside Italian. The highest figures are in Calabria at 64%, Sicily at 61.5% and Campania at 61%. Puglia sits inside that group.
Age concentrates it further. Nationally, 19% of people aged sixty-five and over speak mainly dialect at home, rising to 26.1% among those with lower levels of education.
The dialects of Puglia are not accented Italian. Barese and Salentino are separate systems, with their own vocabulary and grammar, and no translation app handles them.
Two honest qualifications belong here.
The first is that dialect is receding fast. Exclusive or predominant dialect use at home fell from 32% in 1988 to 9.6% in 2024, and the sharpest recent increases in everyday Italian have been in the South.
The second is that dialect is rarely used with strangers. Nationally, 82.6% of people speak mainly Italian when talking to people they do not know. Anyone dealing with you at a counter will almost certainly use Italian.
Which is precisely the point. Dialect is not a barrier to being served. It is a marker of where the conversation stops being transactional, and that is the conversation most people move abroad hoping to join.
Where Italian is not optional but legally required
Some of this is not a matter of getting by at all. It is written into the rules.
If you buy a property and do not speak Italian well enough to understand a legal contract, Italian notarial rules require a sworn interpreter to translate the deed in full at the signing, taking an oath before the notary, with the cost normally falling to the foreign buyer. A bilingual witness is also required, and the deed is read first in Italian and then in the foreign language. The Italian version is the one that governs.
If you are not an EU citizen and you eventually want to move from renewable permits to the EU long-term residence permit, you have to demonstrate Italian at A2 level.
If you want citizenship by naturalization or marriage, the requirement is B1, a full level higher than the A2 asked by Portugal, Spain and France. Certificates for citizenship must come from one of the accredited bodies, and free adult-education certificates that satisfy the residence permit do not satisfy this one.
For anyone comparing Italy with its neighbors on tax and cost of living, that is a difference worth adding to the ledger. Italy asks for more language than the countries it is usually compared against.
The community is smaller than it looks
The reassurance for people worried about language is that there is a large expatriate community to fall back on. It is worth looking at the size of it.
That is roughly two thousand people from the main English-speaking countries, spread across a region of about four million people and more than two hundred and fifty comuni.
The age profile compounds it. Of all foreign residents in Puglia, of every nationality, around 8,500 are aged sixty-five or over, and most of those are long-settled residents from elsewhere in Europe rather than retirees from abroad.
This figure understates the reality, and it is important to say how. The count records registered foreign residents only. Anyone holding Italian citizenship alongside another is counted as Italian, which removes a large share of Italian-American and Italian-British arrivals from the total. It also excludes second-home owners who never register.
So the true number of English-speaking incomers is higher, probably considerably. But it is unlikely to be higher by an order of magnitude, and the shape of the picture holds: in most Pugliese towns, the anglophone community is a handful of households, not a network.
The exception is real and worth naming. In parts of Valle d’Itria, around Ostuni, Ceglie Messapica and Cisternino, foreign buyers have concentrated enough to create something that does function as a community. If having other English speakers nearby matters to you, that is a reason to choose a location deliberately.
What technology does and does not solve
Translation apps have improved enormously, and it would be wrong to be dismissive about them.
A 2025 study of Google Translate in emergency department discharge instructions found an overall error rate of about 5% across twenty-six languages, and concluded that further investigation into the safety of routine use in medical settings was warranted. Earlier work was much less encouraging. A 2021 assessment found accuracy of 55% for Armenian, in one case rendering an instruction about over-the-counter ibuprofen as advice to take an anti-tank missile as needed for pain.
The trajectory is clearly upward. The question is what error rate you are comfortable with, and for what.
One error in twenty is fine for a menu, a supermarket label or a road sign. It is a different proposition for a consent form, a set of discharge instructions or a conversation about your mother’s medication. And an app in your hand does not help at all when a doctor is speaking to you and waiting for an answer.
It also does not do dialect, which is the register your neighbors will use with each other whether or not you are standing there.
What the research on older migrants consistently finds
There is a substantial literature on what happens to people who move countries later in life without the local language, and it is less cheerful than the usual advice.
A systematic review in The Gerontologist found that limited language proficiency made ordinary tasks such as buying groceries or reading prescriptions overwhelming for older migrants, and that those who struggled to communicate frequently experienced loneliness, social isolation and depression, and had difficulty forming meaningful friendships.
Other work points the same way. A study of older migrants in the Netherlands found that limited second-language proficiency fed feelings of linguistic insecurity, which in turn affected the formation of relationships, a sense of belonging and overall wellbeing. A systematic review of loneliness in older-adult migrants noted that arriving in later life brings language barriers and differences in customs that impede the development of new social ties.
There is a large and important caveat attached to all of this, and it should not be skipped.
Almost all of these studies look at people who migrated out of necessity: for work, for family reunification, or as refugees. Many were financially dependent, isolated by circumstance as much as by language, and had little say in where they ended up. An American or Dutch retiree who chose Puglia, arrives with a pension, has a partner, and can afford to travel home is not that population.
Choice changes the picture considerably. But it does not remove a key element that the research identifies, which is that language shapes whether new friendships form, and that friendships formed in later life are harder to replace than the ones left behind.
The literature also notes something that is easy to overlook when planning. Adaptive capacity declines with age, which makes learning a new language harder in later life. “I’ll pick it up when I get there” is a reasonable plan at forty. It becomes steadily tougher at seventy, which is roughly when it starts to matter most.
What this means in practice
None of this is an argument against Puglia, and it is certainly not an argument for waiting until you are fluent. Waiting until you are fluent is how people can end up spending years not moving, or not making any decision. You do not need Italian to visit Puglia, to buy a house there, or to spend a pleasant first year. You will need it to grow old there well.
Four questions seem worth sitting with before committing.
Can you describe a symptom precisely?
Not order a coffee. Describe a pain, its location, when it started, what makes it worse, and understand the answer. This is the level at which Italian stops being a hobby and becomes infrastructure, and it is roughly B1, the same level Italy asks of citizenship applicants.
What are you actually planning to do about it, and by when?
A specific answer, with a start date, is worth more than good intentions. Public adult education centers, the CPIA, run free courses across Italy, and towns with universities have far more options than towns without.
Have you budgeted for interpretation, not just translation?
The notary, the sworn translations of foreign documents, and any dealings with a lawyer or an accountant carry real costs that people planning a move rarely account for.
Who will you talk to on a Tuesday in February?
Not in August, when the town is full and everyone is friendly and half the visitors speak English. In February, when it is raining, the shutters are down and the season is six months away.
That lunch I mentioned at the beginning ended perfectly happily. Somebody eventually noticed I had gone quiet, the table switched back to Italian, and everyone was kind about it.
But I have thought about it often since, because being switched back to is not the same as being included, and the difference between those two things is most of what people are actually hoping for when they imagine a life in Italy.
The language is not a barrier to entry. It is the price of admission to the part you came for.
If you have moved to Puglia or anywhere else in Italy, we would like to know how the language has gone. Better than you expected, worse, or fine until a particular moment when it was not? Write to us and let us know. We’d love to hear from you.
A note on the numbers. The Italian language figures come from ISTAT’s report on the use of Italian, dialects and foreign languages, published in January 2026 and covering 2024, based on interviews with roughly 17,000 households. Regional English proficiency scores come from the 2025 EF English Proficiency Index, which uses self-selected online test takers rather than a random sample and should be read as indicative rather than precise. Foreign resident counts are ISTAT figures as of 1 January 2025 and record registered residents only.