LINGUA
Every day in the Italian press an abundance of English words can be found, such as il look, il tennis, lo style, and il jogging. This is a natural by-product of the status of English as a global language, and it happens in most languages. Especially for sporting terms and names of sports, it is easier to keep the original English terminology than to invent new words and bring them into use, which means that by and large the English is kept! Apart from that, it’s often new terms such as one’s ‘look’ which are circulated via Facebook and Twitter over here before they find their way into Italian papers. This is despite the attempts of the Italian government to preserve the Italian language, with the best example being the mandatory dubbing of all films and TV shows into Italian.
The idea of this survey was to look at some of the stereotypical views of the Italian language and culture. Whilst the results are a relatively small sample of data, it seems this view, as well as the Italian language itself, is a fairly unknown quantity in England, especially when one compares it to the amount of French phrases that have been adopted into English, such as Rendez-vous, café, and déjà vu. The idea is further enforced when one considers that in German and Spanish, for example, it is not uncommon to hear people replacing hello/goodbye with ciao, which would be unusual in English. One of the few clear examples of language borrowing from Italian to English would be capisce to mean “understand?” although this is more common in American slang than English.
The lack of borrowing from Italian into English is both a cause and effect of a relatively high level of ignorance of Italian language and culture in England. It is no-one’s fault, but if you want to learn this beautiful, expressive, passionate language, more than likely you’ll
have to start, and discover it the hard way!
The lack of Italian language in the English press functions as both cause and effect of a relatively high level of ignorance of Italian language and culture
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Grazie and Si were misspelled as Grazi and Ci three times and twice respectively