We set out to examine the stereotypical views people in the UK have of Italians and the Italian language. We conducted some research, asking a random selection of University of Bristol students who do not study Italian or any other romance languages, one simple question: “What are the first three Italian words or phrases (if any) that you can think of?”
The immediately noticeable, and not unexpected finding, was how common food related answers were, with Pizza, Pasta, and Spaghetti all popular answers, as well as Pizzeria and Bolognese. This section of the results shows how we as a nation stereotype the Italians as gastronomes and borrow heavily from their food culture.
The second set of common answers were fairly basic, everyday Italian words, for example grazie, prego, si, molto, bene and bella. This is to be expected, because anyone who has ever been to Italy or has shown any interest in Italian culture may well know of such words. However, what is more interesting is the misspelling of two words in particular, si and grazie when I asked people to write them down. They were misspelled as ci and grazi respectively, multiple times, which could be explained by the fact that people are more used to hearing them than seeing them written down.
BY Sam Linney
Stereotypically
Italian
Photography: Bert Kaufmann -Flickr.com