Why do Italians call the letter J “i lunga”?

While reciting the alphabet, this video calls one letter i lunga — “long i” — rather than giving it its own name. That’s because the traditional Italian alphabet has only 21 letters: J, K, W, X, and Y are officially “foreign letters,” used only in loanwords and names, so J borrows a nickname instead of getting a letter name of its own.

J actually started as a stylistic variant of the letter i in medieval handwriting — a version with a little tail — before other languages gave it its own separate sound. Italian never fully adopted it as a distinct letter, which is why words like Ionio and Jonio (both meaning “Ionian”) are pronounced identically today.