Partly because of provincialism, partly because of mental laziness, partly because we feel trendy and cool, we all seem to be a bit incapable of speaking without inserting Anglicisms or presumed Anglicisms every two or three words. Lunch thus becomes lunch or brunch, in the evening we go to an all you can eat restaurant to talk about the next all-inclusive weekend, perhaps booked online, strictly last minute. Is all this a sign that we are great connoisseurs of English? Not even this: according to Istat data, only 34% of us are able to hold a decent conversation in the language of the Beatles.
Unfortunately, conversations of the type just mentioned are regularly overheard, so much so that one might think that Dante's language is now rapidly transforming into a post-modern idiom, with a vaguely futuristic flavour: Itanglese.
Maurizio Trifone , professor of linguistics at the University of Cagliari, in his recent Itanglese. Storie di parole da abstract a wine-bar (Carocci, 2025, pp. 256) tells - through a rich series of examples, often amusing, taken from everyday language and newspapers - the history of this neo-idiom and of the numerous English or Anglo-American words that penetrated Italian at different times and sometimes through unpredictable ways.
Warning: Trifone's intent is certainly not to criticize the entry of foreign words into our language, nor to impose Italian substitutes, but only to shed light on a linguistic phenomenon that is apparently unstoppable and that in some way says a lot about us Italians , about our eternal attraction to everything that is foreign. After the Second World War, in fact, styles and models of life from outside have spread, in particular from the United States, and driven by market logic and marketing. And a certain cultural subservience towards the outside world has emerged, in particular the Anglo-Saxon one. All elements that are the children of a weak thought typical of us Italians and that leads us to a certain victim mentality and to not fully realize our potential and the importance of Italian. Our language is, in fact, part of our heritage of culture, beauty, history and stories, ideas and words. It belongs to us and identifies us, as part of a culture that has a thousand-year history.
This awareness should push us to reflect on the lexical resources at our disposal: generally, a speaker can choose between an Anglicism and its equally valid Italian equivalent... provided that he knows it , as Maurizio Trifone rightly points out. In short, if one knows little of Dante's language and ignores its multiple lexical options, in the end one inevitably falls back on Itanglish. Perhaps then it is better to know and use Italian more and perhaps also study English better, but the Cambridge one, not the Instagram one.