L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, JANUARY 13, 2022 www.italoamericano.org 26 L'Italo-Americano I t a l y i s a c o u n t r y where beauty is com- m o n . I n t h e l a n d - scape, in art and, of c o u r s e , i n i t s l a n - guage. Italian isn't known as la bella lingua, the beauti- ful language, for no reason. However, Italian has been going through some difficult times, both in Italy and in the US. Languages, all of them, are l i v i n g c o n s t r u c t s : t h e y change and evolve in their structures, lexicon and pho- netics through time. Italian became Italian from Latin, through a variety of stages. English began as a German- sounding idiom, with declen- s i o n s j u s t l i k e L a t i n a n d Greek and letters that no longer exist. Both, of course, are still changing. The influence of for- eign languages, primarily English, has heavily affected our lexicon, with more and more original terms being s u b s t i t u t e d i n c o m m o n speech and writing with their E n g l i s h c o u n t e r p a r t . B u t while this is not necessarily a bad thing, it has perhaps reached worrying levels in the past couple of decades, w h e n p e r f e c t l y c o m m o n I t a l i a n w o r d s h a v e b e e n almost entirely substituted with foreign ones: I am look- ing at you, "meeting" and "suede" for "riunione" and "scamosciato," "make up" and "fashion" for "trucco" and "alla moda," but also at t h e u g l y f a c e s o f " f r i e n d - zonare" ("to friendzone"), " p o s t a r e " ( " t o p o s t " ) a n d even "googlare" ("to google"). Clearly, the diffusion of the internet and of social media h e l p e d t h e c r e a t i o n o f calques, that is, the adapta- tion into Italian of English words. The ongoing angli- cization of our idiom, accord- ing to some, could lead to its d i s a p p e a r a n c e : d r a m a t i c c o n s i d e r a t i o n , b u t w h o knows. Yet, inguistic loans and calques are only part of the issue: we Italians have been working hard on trying to turn our language to rubble, e v e n w h e n f o r e i g n w o r d s aren't involved. It's a matter o f s y n c t a t i c a n d l e x i c a l empoverishment, with the subjunctive being too often abandoned for the imperfect, and our lexicon shrinking day after day: in the long run, i f w e c o n t i n u e d o w n t h i s path, the velvety richness of our language could be irre- mediably lost. At the same time, our lin- gua nazionale continues to be that. We all speak it in the country, and so do people who live in other parts of the world where Italian is an offi- cial language: Switzerland, San Marino and the Vatican. However, we shouldn't forget t h a t t h e I t a l i a n - s p e a k i n g community in the world is much wider than that, and this is when discussing the current situation of the lan- g u a g e i n t h e U S b e c o m e s important. Because Italian is not only the language of the Italians of Italy, but also of t h o s e w o r k i n g a n d l i v i n g abroad, as well as of people of Italian descent. Mind, this doesn't add much to the 60 million speakers there are w i t h i n n a t i o n a l b o r d e r s (some 6 to 10 million more), especially when compared to other romance languages like Spanish and French with, respectively, 570 million and 270 million speakers around the world. Still, once upon a time, it was more common to speak your family's language at home, and that of the country where you lived in all other contexts: it is, in the end, one of the reasons Italian did remain alive in the US. It was also quite common to learn it at a later stage, as a way to embrace more fully one's h e r i t a g e o r , p e r h a p s , i n preparation of that trip of a lifetime to your ancestral hometown. Today however, as reported in a recent piece by Zachary Vogt published online by Italics Mag, the sit- uation is different: Italian speakers around the world are not increasing and, in the US, Italian is the "fastest dying language," according to 2018 data. In the relatively short space of 16 years, from 2001 and 2017, the number of Italian-Americans speak- ing la bella lingua at home almost halved, going from 900,000 to 550,000. Of course, with the older generations – more likely to have spoken Italian in the f i r s t p l a c e – s l o w l y b u t inevitably passing away, the trend was foreseeable. Yet, the naturally expected gener- ational change, with younger people continuing to use the language of their grandpar- ents because they learned it as children or picked it up as subject in school and univer- sity, didn't take place. Italian l a n g u a g e p r o g r a m s h a v e been declining as fast and steeply as the number of peo- ple speaking it. The percent- age of K-12 students learning a foreing language is rather l o w a t 2 0 % , a n d I t a l i a n counts only for about 1% of it. At university level, only 6% of institutions have an Italian department, and enrollment numbers are getting lower. So, what could be done to save our bellissima lingua from becoming a shadow of its beautiful self? Some have s u g g e s t e d – a m o n g t h e m singer Gianna Nannini – to create and enact laws aimed at protecting the Italian lan- guage, following the example o f F r a n c e ' s 1 9 9 4 T o u b o n Law, which imposes the use of French in all official gov- ernment communications and matters (no "lockdown" for them, I think), as well as strict regulations on the use of foreign terms in advertise- ment. A r o u n d t h e w o r l d , t h e Ministry of Foreign Affairs a n d I n t e r n a t i o n a l Cooperation has been work- ing to promote and strength- en the presence of the Italian language, with its Settimana della Lingua Italiana nel Mondo, about which L'Italo- Americano had the oppor- tunity to speak in more than one occasion. The dissemina- tion and use of our language online is, on the other hand, at the heart of Italiana, an o n l i n e p o r t a l c r e a t e d i n March this year and run by La Farnesina, which aims at promoting our culture and our language by offering a one-stop location for all that has to do with Italian culture, f r o m p o e t r y t o f o o d a n d wine, from art to tourism and the environment. T h e r e i s a l o t w e , a s I t a l i a n s a n d I t a l i a n - A m e r i c a n s c a n d o , t o o , though. We can learn, speak and use our beautiful lan- guage every day, and with pride. We don't want it to b e c o m e t h e 2 1 s t c e n t u r y Latin. Do we? Are we Italians cherishing our language enough? GIULIA FRANCESCHINI Chatting along a Venetian canal: Italian is our national language, but fewer people are speaking it around the world (Photo: Rachel Blunden/Dreamstime) LIFE PEOPLE PLACES HERITAGE TRADITIONS

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