Italian word of the day: ‘Succedere’

One phrase you’ll hear all the time in spoken Italian is “Che succede?”

This simply means “what’s happening?”, a question which you might find yourself asking frequently after relocating to a country where confusion abounds.

So it’s well worth getting comfortable with the various forms of this phrase, and of the verb succedere (hear it pronounced here) which means “to happen”.

There are a few Italian verbs that translate as “to happen”: succedere, accadere, and capitare.

But succedere is probably the most commonly used in everyday speech. It conveys the idea that something is ongoing or about to happen, especially to somebody.

This verb follows regular conjugation in the present tense, so the third-person singular form needed for something or ‘it’ to happen is succede.

So when you’re trying to work out what’s going on at the moment, the phrase you’ll need is:

Che succede?

What’s happening?

Or you could use the passato prossimo (past tense) when talking about a one-off event that has just happened. This form takes the auxiliary verb essere (“to be”), meaning the correct phrase is:

Che è successo?

What’s happened?

A more informal way of asking what’s happening or what’s going on is che c’è?, or cosa c’è?

Here you can use any of ways to say “What?” in Italian: "che?" "che cosa?" and "cosa?" are used interchangeably. So you might hear variations on any of these phrases, such as cosa è successo?

And sometimes, Italians start a question with a verb instead and might ask:

È successo qualcosa?

Did something happen?

To any of these questions, hopefully you'll be able to reply with: 

È tutto a posto

Everything’s fine

If you find yourself at a loss to explain whatever situation is unfolding around you, you could always respond with non lo so (I don't know). But the more expressive, more Italian response you might reach for instead would be boh or chissà, accompanied by a theatrical shrug.

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