Traditionalists have long railed against ‘Itangliano’ and what they see as anglicization (anglicisation or ‘Englishification’) of the Italian language, particularly when English words come to eclipse perfectly good Italian ones.
But the ruling party in Italy’s government, in its most recent effort to tap into cultural divides, has taken things a few steps further and proposed banning the use of foreign words in place of Italian ones – with suggested fines of up to 100,000 euros for businesses, public offices, universities and other institutions which persist in dropping anglicisms into their “official communications”.
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The MPs behind the bill argue steep penalties are needed to stop the widespread use of foreign – and particularly English – words, which they say “demeans” the Italian language and even poses a threat to Italian “nationality and identity”.
While this is just a draft law at this stage, and there’s a good chance nothing will ever come of it, the proposal has reignited a long-running debate in Italy between language purists and those who believe languages are fluid, interconnected, and constantly evolving.
The number of English-derived words used in Italian is believed to be increasing all the time, thanks primarily to the influence of social media, and today almost 9,000 anglicisms feature in the Treccani dictionary out of a total of around 800,000 words in the Italian language.
But the habit of dropping these terms into Italian sentences is nothing new – particularly among Italian teenagers, advertising executives, and politicians.
In Italian workplaces too you’re likely to hear words like ‘meeting’ and ‘computer’ used regularly – and native English speakers may find they need to use them, but with a heavy Italian accent, in order to be understood by Italian colleagues.
Many Italians have long expressed their dislike of these imported words, which are widely seen as ‘trendy’; and the word ‘trendy’ itself has come to be a much more fashionable replacement for the Italian equivalent, fashionable – even though the word is deemed unacceptably dated by native English-speaking teens.
The word ‘weekend’ is now in common usage (though weekend is also still used) and ‘privacy’ is ubiquitous, likely because there’s no easy Italian equivalent word. Italian teens have also taken to using ‘cringe’ to express feelings of acute awkwardness, much to the bemusement of their English-speaking peers, for whom the word belongs to the same excruciatingly uncool era as ‘trendy’.
Some more recently-adopted anglicisms likely to provoke an exasperated eye-roll from Italian parents and teachers include verbs like chat (to send an instant message), bookare (as in booking a band or artist for a show)or – a favourite of teenage gamers – guys. There’s also the online-dating derived ghostare and friendzoneare, plus shareare (which would otherwise be share in Italian) whatsappare (which is when you send someone a whatsappino) and even to spoil (to give away the plot of a film).
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While such words are often borrowed to describe new concepts which the Italian language didn’t have a word for, this isn’t always the case. Among most Italians, by far the most common complaint about such English verbs conjugated in Italian however is not that they’re unnecessary, or that they threaten Italian national identity: much worse, it’s that they sound ugly – or at least not as beautiful as their regular Italian equivalents.
In fact, many of these Italianised English verbs, many of which are now listed as new words by Italy’s respected language guardians at the Accademia della Crusca, also featured among the “most hated” anglicisms according to a poll of Italians conducted in 2022, along with terms including ‘brainstorming’ and ‘coffee break’.
Coffee break or pausa caffè – which would you rather have? (Photo by GABRIEL BOUYS / AFP)
For native English speakers in Italy, the difficulty with English words adopted into Italian is more that their meanings often change or get lost in translation, leading to misunderstandings or just bewilderment.
One common example is ‘trekking’, which is what Italians call hiking or hill walking. For native English speakers, trekking would be more applicable if you’re planning to spend several weeks traversing some sort of remote and hostile terrain.
Similarly, ‘footing’ has often been used in Italian to mean ‘jogging’, though thankfully that one seems to have fallen out of use lately; ‘zapping’ can be inexplicably used to mean flicking between TV channels, which we might call channel-surfing. Meanwhile, a coach or bus is un Pullman – derived from the name of a type of luxurious train carriage in the early 1900s – while Italian men call their underpants un slip and their tuxedo un smoking.
In other cases, an English-language word or phrase that fell out of use decades ago in English-speaking countries – and which perhaps had narrow usage to begin with – remains in use in Italy today.
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One example of this is the phrase ‘radical chic’, a term from 1970s America which is often employed by Italian populist politicians today to mean something like ‘champagne socialist’ and suggests privilege and the adoption of left-wing views seen as fashionable. The term was famously used by the Italian culture minister recently to criticise the use of foreign words in Italian – a habit which he said, without a hint of irony, was “very radical chic snobbery”. The word ‘snobismo’ meanwhile is derived from the English ‘snob’, and translates as ‘snobbery’.
In other cases, an English-sounding word or phrase used in Italian is so unfamiliar to native speakers that we might suspect it has been entirely made up.
There’s ‘smart working’, which is what many Italians call remote work or working from home, and it’s often assumed this is what we call it in English-speaking countries, too. It’s not clear exactly where that one came from, but it was used prolifically by the former government of Giuseppe Conte during the pandemic.
You may also have noticed signs advertising a ‘Self Bar’ or ‘Self Bank’ have proliferated in Italy in recent years. While the intended meaning is clear enough (a vending machine or ATM), it’s the sort of thing that will keep English grammar pedants up at night.
Of course, these things can go both ways and the meanings of Italian terms borrowed into English tend to shift, too – see ‘fresh’, for example.
There are thousands more words derived from English that are currently in use in Italy. Do you have a favourite – or least favourite – that’s not mentioned here? Please share it with us in the comments section below.