Joel Dwek offers the other side of the language debate, and discusses how we can see more and more Italian words infiltrating the English language.
The most commonly known area where English has borrowed from Italian is in the world of food. We like to dine al fresco and have our pasta al dente. Just saying we'll eat outside and have our pasta slightly undercooked just wouldn't seem right. We drink espresso, cappuccino and mocha, and use these terms in our daily lives rather than give them English names. Sometimes we do anglicise the words, and thus we get biscuit from biscotto. Interestingly, however, al fresco means very little to an Italian - at best, it is a rarely used phrase to refer to someone in prison. Biscotto, on the other hand, is a compound of ‘cotto’ (to mean ‘cooked’) with a the latinate prefix of ‘bis’, which hints at the process of twice cooking the snack.
THE CRESCENDO OF THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE ON ENGLISH
We're all aware of the fact that English has had an enormous influence on the lexis of many languages today. From download to cash back, lobby to software, our increasingly globalised world has turned English into not simply just a lingua franca for many people, but into one of the largest influences on other languages, particularly Italian. But, of course, the exchange of words is a two way street, and English has absorbed many words from other languages, including Italian. Although it may be that English is a globally more known and recognised tongue, Italian has still lent us many words we know today, even if they aren't as common as download or gigabyte. To begin, we need to distinguish what a loanword is. Given that both English and Italian share a Latin root, it would be incorrect to state that every word with an exact Italian equivalent (i.e. particolare and particular) is a loanword.
34