“The future of the Italian language is at risk”, the warning from Crusca

According to D’Achille, without timely interventions, Italian risks a progressive decline: “otherwise it will only end up definitively supplanting the dialects, at least in certain areas, because it will itself be reduced to dialect, used in speech, in informal writingsor perhaps (as has in fact happened for some Italian dialects) in literature; will continue to be used in school for the first year literacybut then, during the course of his studies, it will be progressively abandoned, also because it is now deprived of a reference standard. It will therefore, in fact, be about an Italian embarking on that process of destandardization which inevitably marks the death of a language, which already happened for Latin in the age of the late empire”.

Probably, to quote a famous poem by Thomas Stearns Eliot from 1925, ‘The Empty Men’, theat the end of the Italian it will happen “not with a crash but with a moan”“but, inevitably, even if after us, it will happen. We still have time to prevent it”, observed D’Achille, at the helm of the centuries-old Florentine institution responsible for safeguarding the ‘treasure’ of the language of Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca and Giovanni Boccaccio.

The fact that knowledge of English is indispensable today, argued the academic from Crusca, “cannot and is not doubted by anyone and, it must be admitted, it is certainly positive that the linguistic skills in English among the younger generations are constantly growing (even better, according to some studies, than those possessed for Italian)”. But the expansion of English “cannot fail to cause some concern regarding the fate of Italian. The massive (and very conspicuous) presence of non-adapted anglicisms in various sectoral languages ​​and in the common language itself is not particularly worrying, although, of course, the systematic use of foreign words when more transparent Italian alternatives are already available still makes a certain impression; and the same goes for the presence of pseudo-anglicisms, formal or semantic, such as the now dated ‘ticket’ and ‘silver’ and the more recent ‘smart working and ‘green pass’. What is rather disturbing – explained D’Achille – are the semantic shift of some Italian terms, such as ‘conference’ in the sense of ‘conference’ or ‘courtesy’ for ‘concession’, certain syntactic novelties relating to verbal transitivity or prepositional regencies, already problematic in themselves (I mention only the case of ‘help with homework’), and the ever-increasing use of acronyms, absolutely opaque if borrowed from English, which provides a syntactic order of words different from that of the Romance languages (think of AI, much more frequent than AI to indicate Artificial Intelligence)”.

But above all, we must reflect, the president of the Accademia della Crusca warned, “on the fact that English is progressively taking away space from Italian in study and research. It has now become essential to publish in English not only to be read abroad but also to be evaluated in Italy; there are sectors, and not only of the so-called “hard sciences” or STEM, in which Italian, in fact, is almost no longer used, just as there are university courses of study, even three-year courses (in which full competence in Italian is required by law), which are held entirely in English, in the name of an internationalization that could only prove to be such on paper, and which in any case seem to be made specifically to invite young people to go and work abroad (and then, perhaps, we complain about the ‘brain drain’!)”.

“This assault on our language by English, or rather by Anglo-American, does not concern (it is true) only Italian, but other languages ​​resist better, such as, on the one hand, German and, on another, Spanish and French. The problem is that these languages – for a series of historical reasons – have, in addition to an international diffusion, also a stronger rooting in their respective countries of origin than Italian has in Italy, which was born very late as a unitary state – explained D’Achille – It is certainly no coincidence that the Académie française and the Academia Espaola carry out tasks that we could define as institutional which were never entrusted to Crusca: in France and Spain there is a linguistic policy which in Italy, also due to the nationalistic measures adopted during the twenty years of fascism, he has always been absent from the post-war period onwards. It must also be said that words are linked to things and that, if not only the economy and information technology, but also music, fashion, cinematography, furniture, etc. they speak English today (and if The new words collected and studied by the Accademia della Crusca are predominantly English), it also means that our creative capacity has been reduced and that we prefer to import things, concepts and ideas from the Anglo-American world. We need to go back to inventing! We cannot delude ourselves into thinking that we can live off melodrama, which we must know and preserve”. (by Paolo Martini)