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Il degrado della lingua italiana
The French are always the one’s worrying about the revolting infiltration of English upon their beautiful and august language — and rightly so — but in my experience it is the Italians who should be worrying. One need only look at their newspapers to see the wretched expansion of English into one of the most beautiful languages of Europe, and indeed the world. Carla Bruni is “la first lady”? What’s wrong with “prima signora” or some other such equivalent.
“Il day after” should be “Il giorno dopo”.
I’m sure there must be some way of phrasing “political trash” in Italian.
“Black out” could be “mancanza di alimentazione” or “guasto a linea elettrica”. Admittedly, neither are excellent headline material compared to the nine-letter bisyllabic “black out”, but this tendency to include Englishisms in printed Italian should be resisted by editors & readers alike.
This post was published on Friday, August 7th, 2009 11:16 am. It has been categorised under Newspapers and been tagged under Italy, Language, Newspapers. Click here to view comments or respond.
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7 Comments so far
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4:13 am
‘Englishisms’ plaguing the Italian language is so grave that it might (or should) have become already one of the most used pickup lines in, say, the library gild.
There are few things so jejune and defacing than saying (let alone writing) in Italian “il killer” instead of “il assassino” or “il sicario”. I really dont get it.
Reversely, a close language like Spanish (from Spain) seems to be quite resilient to this banale trend. Unfortunately, that doesnt mean that Spanish (in Spain) is not impoverished. It definitely is. Whereas in America Spanish is plagued by anglicisms but with occasional delightful flashes (typically, Iberian archaisms otherwise kept alive and kicking), in Spain itself it is just a plain, dull, language.
But at least we still say “Primera Dama”, dont we?.
9:47 am
I think we must remember that the influence of popular American culture and hence American English (rather than British English) has much to do with America as the liberating power.
6:40 am
If you think Italian newspapers got bad, you should check out Korean newspapers and compare them throughout the decades.
3:55 pm
Che peccato – definitely tragic. And ironic considering how historically influential Italy used to be.
2:20 pm
Perhaps ‘prima donna’ is a better translation of ‘first lady.’
12:48 am
So sad.
11:59 pm
This article doesn’t even mention the two words that bug me the most in the Italian press: “partner” and “killer”. What about “amante” and “assassino”? They can’t say that Americans invented those concepts after all.