“Dunque, ai giovani che chance restano?”
The interference of foreign words within languages is nothing new. The English language has been doing it for centuries; from the menus of royal banquets as far back as Henry VIII being written in French, to the dominant use of Italian within the terminology of music, the English language has long been adopting an extra vocabulary taken from outside its own in order to go beyond its linguistic limitations. It still uses these terms today. We understand, for instance, what we mean by ‘al dente’, ‘schadenfreude’, ‘laissez-faire’ or ‘et al.’ without stopping to think that we are speaking four different languages. (NB, the ‘venti’ size category at Starbucks, a nonsense word used by a tax evading multinational to exploit the Western world’s caffeine gluttony with a malign and corporatist irony, is not the same thing. The use of ‘NB’, on the other hand, was entirely without irony and actually an effortless demonstration of the point.)
But this absorption of foreign terms is not just a feature of the English language; it is also true of Italian. What is interesting, however, is the extent and speed at which this process is occurring within Italy today, particularly within the lexicon of popular culture. The assimilation of foreign, in particular, English words appears to be a very modern tendency in Italy. ‘La cover’, ‘il software’, ‘il target’, ‘l’audience’, ‘il business’, ‘il backstage pass’, ‘la privacy’, ‘un t-shirt’, ‘il weekend’, 'super'were all words that we came across during our years abroad. On the one hand, this can be explained in one easy sentence: the rise and rise of American popular culture. From cinema to television; fashion to music, American cultural production holds enormous influence in what is considered ‘popular’ or ‘cool’ in Italy. Since the language of American pop culture is English, it makes sense that the Italian language has developed to include words from this idiom.
This explanation neglects to consider one crucial point, however. Is this linguistic morphing a passive process or an active choice? If it is the former, is that simply because American pop culture is too powerful, just too big? In Tom’s year abroad essay, he discussed the world of dubbing in Italian television and came to understand the overwhelmingly normalised consumption of American TV shows amongst young Italians. The same is true at the Italian box office. Last years’ big releases in Italian cinemas were more often than not Hollywood productions. As Brits, we need only to think of this happening within our own country. How popular a TV program is Friends? That program has been re-running on Channel 4 for most of our 23 years of life. Can the same be said for Peep Show in America? It seems doubtful.
Hugh Stanley and Tom Gidman take a look at “il business” of linguistic crossovers from English to Italian.
SUPER AMERICAN "CULTURA"