Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.2434

AUTHOR: Virginia Pulcini
TITLE: The Influence of English on Italian
SUBTITLE: Lexical and Cultural Features
SERIES TITLE: LANGUAGE CONTACT AND BILINGUALISM
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Lelija Socanac

SUMMARY

This book provides an up-to-date overview of the influence of English on Italian, exploring the historical, social, cultural, and linguistic aspects of the contact between Italy and English-speaking countries. Types of English-induced borrowings are presented on the basis of quantitative and qualitative information provided by Italian lexicographic sources and corpus-based evidence. Criteria of currency and frequency are discussed with reference to a multilingual project (GLAD – Global Anglicisms Database), offering a contribution to loanword lexicography.

The book consists of a List of figures, a List of tables, seven chapters, Conclusions, References, Index of names/subjects, and Index of borrowings and quoted words.

Chapter 1: “Introducing the Study of Anglicisms in Italian” provides an overview of the impact of English as a global language on European languages, focusing on Italian. The influence of one language on another depends on a number of social and psychological factors such as a favorable or hostile socio-political setting, language ideology and policy, language attitudes, etc. Contacts occur in the history of most languages. For this reason, linguistic purism is contradicted by historical evidence witnessing that languages change over time under internal and external pressures resulting in innovation, creativity, and imitation. Although the languages and cultures of Europe have intensely influenced one another for centuries, the ‘Anglicization’ of European languages intensified in the post-Second World War period. In the new millennium, the removal of space and time barriers thanks to increased mobility, the mass media, the internet and social networks, have led to far more intense contacts across geographical boundaries, and the influence of English has spread to all areas of knowledge, culture, and society. Thus, global English functions as a ‘cultural adstrate’ around the world, exporting language and culture to societies that are only virtually close. In the future, the influence of English is likely to intensify even further, offering linguists interested in language contact a variety of English-induced phenomena to record and describe.

The influence of English on Italian is the outcome of a long-standing relationship which started several centuries ago, intensified in the 18th century, and has massively increased since the second half of the 20th century. Contacts between the two languages mostly belong to distant borrowing, with lexical borrowing the most common outcome. Thus, although Italian has expanded its vocabulary with hundreds of English words, this has not affected its morpho-syntactic system. The most common types of borrowing are single-word items and compounds. A variety of phraseological units can also be observed. The research data providing the basis for the book were retrieved from various sources, including historical accounts of contacts between Italy and English-speaking countries, dictionaries, online newspaper archives, and language corpora.

The study of Anglicisms in Italian cannot be approached without considering how this phenomenon has affected other languages. A pioneer in the comparative study of Anglicisms in European languages was Rudolf Filipović (1974, 1996), who set up the project ‘The English Element in European Languages’ as early as the 1960s and who identified some guiding principles and a methodology to study the integration of Anglicisms in selected receiving languages. This ambitious project was followed up by Manfred Görlach, who completed the Dictionary of European Anglicisms (2001) and some companion articles and volumes (Görlach 2002a).

Chapter 2: “English in Italy: History of language contact” reviews the historical contacts between Italy and the English-speaking countries in chronological order and provides examples of loanwords imported in the course of time. The goal is to illustrate the historical circumstances that favored the adoption of Anglicisms over the centuries, highlighting the domains which were affected. Early contacts resulting from commercial and diplomatic relations in the periods between the 13th and the 17th centuries brought into Italian a few terms related to British political and social life. In the 18th century, many Anglicisms were imported from the domains of politics, fashion, and social life. This period was characterized by ‘Anglomania’, admiration for British society and culture. In the 19th century, a number of Anglicisms related to transport, industrial production, fashion, and sports started entering the language. Due to its international dominance in the 18th and 19th centuries, French often acted as a mediator between English and Italian. The fascist regime in Italy (1922-1945) was the only historical period when resistance to foreign influence was regulated by legislation. The creation of domestic equivalents to replace foreign borrowings was encouraged. After the Second World War, the ‘Americanization’ of Italian society began, with an increase in borrowings from the fields of information and communication technology (ICT), economics and its sub-disciplines, science, and the internet. The new millennium brought intense mass communication through web-mediated channels, increased circulation of neologisms and translations from English, and improved English competence among the Italian professionals and general population. Moreover, many Italian neologisms originating from EU documents were translated from English.

Chapter 3: “Direct borrowings” introduces the terminology in use in the field of language contact and bilingualism. Direct borrowings denote lexical items which keep the formal features of the donor language, while indirect borrowings replace the model with a translation (calque), or add a new imported meaning to an already existing word (semantic borrowing). According to traditional approaches, the borrowing process triggers a remodeling of the source word according to the rules of the receiving language. The independent creation of lexical ‘copies’ in the recipient language is emphasized by cognitive approaches (Alexieva 2008), according to which the donor language limits itself to offering a model, or prototype, to the recipient language, which will creatively reproduce it in order to innovate its own lexicon. Lexical borrowing is not a straightforward, one-way process, since words may be transferred by multiple routes.

In this chapter, direct borrowings are described, in particular non-adapted loanwords as the largest category. Besides one-word Anglicisms, the category of compounds is very productive. Hybrid neological combinations of Italian and English elements are potentially productive. The category of abbreviations, including acronyms, clippings, and blends, is also quite abundant. Further types of borrowings are also considered, such as Latinisms, eponyms, archaisms, exoticisms, and interjections, as well as pseudo-Anglicisms. The creation of pseudo-Anglicisms is a growing phenomenon, and sometimes the same pseudo-Anglicisms circulate across languages. The chapter ends with the treatment of phraseology. In addition to phraseologisms, lexical items with a pragmatic function are discussed, including interjections, discourse markers, vocatives, and other constructions.

Chapter 4: “Integration and indirect borrowings” deals with phonological, orthographic, morpho-syntactic, and semantic integration of Anglicisms in Italian. Integration is defined as the positioning of a loanword within the new linguistic environment of the recipient language. Phonological integration affects the pronunciation of non-adapted Anglicisms. Over the past decades, the pronunciation of Anglicisms has been quite close to the English model, owing to their input through audio channels and a greater competence in spoken English of younger generations of Italians. Orthographic and morphological integration affect the formal appearance of Anglicisms. The influence of French mediation is evident both in the spelling and pronunciation in some cases. Grammatical (or morpho-syntactic) integration involves gender attribution, the assignment of grammatical class (mainly noun, adjective, adverb, or verb), and formal adaptation (e.g., Italian verbs display inflectional endings for mood, person, number, and gender). The scale of adaptability common to contact situations places nouns in the top position among the open-class words, and less frequent elements such as adverbs and interjections at the bottom. As to semantic integration, the most common feature is reduction of meaning with respect to the English model, both in the case of technical and scientific terms and common words. The opposite phenomenon is semantic extension, often due to metaphor and metonymy. In some cases, pejoration or amelioration of meaning is observed. Whereas phonological and morpho-syntactic integration is language-specific, lexical meaning can be observed cross-linguistically, so that the meaning of an Anglicism in Italian can be compared to the meaning that the same Anglicism has developed in other recipient languages.

The chapter also deals with the two main types of indirect borrowings: calques and semantic loans. The former replace the English model by an Italian translation equivalent, while the latter borrow a new meaning which is attached to an already existing Italian word. The genetic similarity between English and Italian lexicons resulting from their shared classical word-stock is constantly referred to since it is considered crucial in establishing typological distinctions. On the one hand, it facilitates the transfer of Anglicisms and their integration into Italian; on the other, it makes the description of indirect borrowings particularly difficult.

Another topic discussed in this chapter is the coexistence of Anglicisms with their Italian equivalents. No definitive conclusions can be reached on the factors that influence speakers’ preferences regarding the choice between an Anglicism and an Italian word. Preliminary data suggest that brevity, modernity, and prestige play in favor of Anglicisms, while semantic opacity and difficult pronunciation of an Anglicism may induce speakers to opt for the Italian word. The historical dimension of language contact is addressed with reference to internationalisms, which may help to refine the typology of lexical borrowings, separating Anglicisms from independent heritage vocabulary and neological creations.

Chapter 5: “Dictionaries, newspaper archives and corpora” aims to explore the notion of ‘Anglicization’ of Italian as an open question rather than a given fact. It provides objective figures on the number of Anglicisms in Italian on the basis of selected sources, namely dictionaries, newspaper archives, and language corpora. The number of Anglicisms recorded by dictionaries varies from over a thousand to several thousand, depending on their size and time frame, on divergent criteria of inclusion of technical and scientific terms, and on the types of borrowing considered. To illustrate this, a comparison is made between the letter J entries in representative dictionaries and the selection involving the GLAD’s word list. Candidate Anglicisms were then searched in a newspaper archive (‘la Repubblica’) and in two corpora of Italian, CORIS and Italian Web 2020, to verify their currency, frequency, orthographic forms, and meanings. The corpus-based query proved that Anglicisms are low-frequency items in Italian. New data on the sociolinguistic distribution of Anglicisms in spoken and written registers may contribute to place the supposed ‘invasion’ of Anglicisms in a more objective perspective.

Chapter 6: “Anglicisms in specialized domains” explores Anglicisms in domains that have been intensely affected by English borrowings, namely ICT, economy, and sport. After more than two centuries, the introduction of Anglicisms in the field of sport has started to decline and many English sports terms, especially those related to popular sports such as football, have been replaced by Italian equivalents. By contrast, ICT and economy appear to be extremely productive. Both fields possess terminology that is confined only to expert-to-expert communication as well as words that have spread to the general vocabulary. Research into the ‘vertical’ variation in the use of Anglicisms by different communities of practice has not been adequately explored in the Italian context so far. At the other end of the spectrum, the neglected area of obsolescence is examined based on a sample of old-fashioned Anglicisms, many of which have fallen out of use and are no longer included in general dictionaries. Lexical obsolescence usually occurs when material referents or fashions die out. In many cases, some meanings become obsolete without the loss of the word. Equally peripheral are Anglicisms occasionally used in newspapers, adverts, and shop signs because of their eye-catching value, which makes the English language ‘visible’ in the Italian linguistic landscape.

Chapter 7: “English in Italian education” deals with the growing importance of English in Italian education since the second half of the 20th century. Italy has gradually aligned its educational system with the model of mother tongue + two foreign languages recommended by the European Union. However, national reforms have increasingly encouraged the study of English, which has become the undisputed first foreign language in all educational cycles, followed by French and, to a much lesser degree, German and Spanish. Attitudes toward English are highly favorable thanks to its positive associations with modernity and because of its importance in the job market. The goal of internationalization of higher education goes hand in hand with its ‘Anglicization’. Opinions on the popularity of English expressed by Italian scholars are presented, including the intervention of the Italian Accademia della Crusca in support of the use of Italian in education. The Accademia’s stand, however, is generally more inclined to fostering a greater respect for Italian, rather than resentment towards English. Despite protectionist reactions, the spread of English in Italy is generally perceived as an opportunity rather than a threat, and efforts are being made in education to raise the competence of Italian learners of English up to the level of their more advanced European peers.

EVALUATION

The book offers an updated overview of lexical borrowing from English into Italian, filling a gap in the literature on English-Italian studies available to English-speaking readers. Although the focus is on the Italian language, the phenomenon of language contact has been explored in a wider sociolinguistic perspective, focusing on the spread of English as a global language and its influence on many world languages.

The book is clearly written and very well organized, providing a short introduction to each topic, detailed analysis of selected examples, and a summary for each chapter.
It is an essential reading for upper-level undergraduate students, graduate students, researchers, and anyone interested in contact linguistics in general, and Anglicisms in Italian in particular.

Overall, this is an excellently researched book which will certainly inspire future research.

REFERENCES

Alexieva, N. (2008). How and Why are Anglicisms often Lexically Different from their English Etymons? In R. Fischer & H. Pulaczewska (eds.). Anglicisms in Europe. Linguistic Diversity in a Global Context. 42-51. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Filipović, R. (1974). A Contribution to the method of studying Anglicisms in European languages. Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia. 37. 135-148.

Filipović, R. (1996). English as a word donor to other languages of Europe. In R.Hartmann (ed). The English Language in Europe. 37-46. Oxford: Intellect.

Görlach, M. (2001). A Dictionary of European Anglicisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Görlach, M. (2002a). English in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Prof. Dr. Lelija Socanac is a retired professor of the Foreign Language Department, Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, Croatia. Her research interests include contact linguistics and multilingualism, English as a global language, language policy and planning, historical sociolinguistics, legal linguistics, and critical discourse analysis.