New Words and New Forms of Linguistic Purism in the 21st Century: The Italian Debate

Abstract

Unlike communities of speakers of other Romance languages such as French and Spanish, it has often been noticed that many Italian speakers are not particularly concerned by the inflow of foreign (mainly English) words. One reason for this, according to some scholars, is that standard Italian does not stir up linguistic identity for many native users, while English enjoys great prestige as the international language. In this paper, positions on neologisms of foreign origin are illustrated, using recently updated monolingual Italian dictionaries and also comments on neologisms collected from blogs and websites. Although they have a different status and degree of representativeness, the latter respond faster than dictionaries to doubts concerning the use of loans in Italian texts.

Analysis of False Phraseological Anglicisms in Modern Italian Language

“…Despite of the lack of faithful rendering of an English archetype, their components represent authentic English lexical items. For instance, taking separately the words fly, down and know, chicken are apparent English lexical units, but the phrases 'fly down' [3] and 'I know my chickens' are truly Italian innovations. Speaking of the latter, 'I know my chickens' means that a breeder knows her animals (the people around her) well or, in figurative way, to know one's customers and to be nobody's fool.…”

A taxonomic approach to the use of English in the Italian media

“…Over the last 15 years, Italian linguists have been describing and debating the growing presence of English in Italian, through analyses of loans (D'Achille, 2017; Furiassi, 2018; Marazzini, 2018; Marazzini & Petralli, 2015; Marello, 2020; Pinnavaia, 2005; Rogato, 2008; Sgroi, 2017, 2018). For instance, Pinnavaia (2005) argues for a strong connection between pragmatics and semantics behind English use in the Italian press.…”

“…These studies have focused on the increasing use of English in these diverse types of media. In addition, much ink has been spilled about the 'invasion' of unnecessary English words appearing in the Italian media in general, by linguists (Furiassi, 2018;Giovanardi, 2017;Marazzini, 2018;Marello, 2020;Sgroi, 2017Sgroi, , 2018, lexicographers (Zoppetti, 2018(Zoppetti, , 2019, and non-linguist academics (Barenghi, 2016) alike.…”

“…Adding to recent scholarship that addresses these ideological debates about the supposed invasion of English in Italian (Karczewska, 2015;Marazzini & Petralli, 2015;Marello, 2020;Sgroi, 2017Sgroi, , 2018 we explore uses of English in online Italian newspaper headlines and subheadings, and we concentrate, in particular, on the pervasiveness of English borrowings where their usage does not seem motivated by necessity. By necessary borrowings we refer to 'borrowings of new concepts together with their original terms, [like] computer,' which occur because the receiving language does not have a semantic equivalent (Onysko & Winter-Froemel, 2011, p. 1551.…”

“…First, prior scholars (Pulcini, Furiassi, & Rodríguez-González, 2012) have observed that newspaper headlines are the principal source of attestation of Anglo neologisms in many European languages. Second, as a register that is professionally written yet contains features of informal everyday speech, newspaper articles are regarded as the best compromise when studying the lexicon of a language (Marello, 2020). Third, headings and subheadings arguably function as attention-getters (Bhatia, 1992), intended to motivate further reading.…”