20 Years of Anglicisms in the Corriere della Sera - The Process of Acceptance of Anglicisms in Formal Domains of Italian

Abstract

During the last two decades, the field of linguistics witnessed the rise of English to the classification of globally recognised lingua franca, an evolution which necessarily involved the permeation of English into other languages. This process of influence was thoroughly researched by academics, especially in Europe, culminating in the triptych by Manfred Görlach, a collective work analysing the influence of English into major European languages. The focus of all the academics writing with Görlach is studying this intrusion, which operates predominantly through English direct and indirect borrowings, neologisms-to-be which at the beginning are merely terms employed by the speaking community of non-Anglophone countries like Italy, which eventually become recognised as Italian terms. But when and how does an English term develop into a real and formal word of the target language, in this case Italian? The aim of this dissertation is to scrutinise the various processes of acceptance of English terms in two of the most formal written domains of Italian, namely dictionaries and newspapers. Both of them have their methods, which are similar, and the interplay created by the connection of these two and anglicisms themselves provides a precise insight into the phenomenon of anglicisation in the Italian language. The analysis of the methods adopted by the Zingarelli dictionary and the policy of the Corriere della Sera will eventually be demonstrated through a 20-years investigation of leading articles of the already mentioned newspaper, from 2002 to 2022. An extra-analysis of 2023 articles from several newspapers will conclude the temporal lapse by portraying the current situation of the major Italian newspapers. This dissertation final result is a comprehensive and exhaustive inquiry of the phenomenon of anglicisation, a picture complete of theory and fulfilment into practice where rules, suggestions, methods and processes adopted by authors and editors are explained, demonstrated and eventually analysed.