 Strong Italian and (to a lesser extent) Corsican influences make it more intelligible to speakers of Italian than to other extant Provençal dialects.In the past, Nice welcomed many immigrants from Italy (who continue to make up a large proportion of the population), as well as Spanish and Portuguese immigrants.However, in the past few decades immigration has been opened to include immigrants from all over the world, particularly those from former Northern and Western African colonies, as well as southeast Asia.