by Dianne Hales
When the morning’s speakers laud the merits of Italian as the ideal international language, the notion doesn’t strike me—as it might have at one time—as preposterous. No other tongue expresses human feelings and emotions more powerfully. No other language offers so many sfumature (subtle shadings) that can sidestep conflict and foster understanding and cooperation. Sure, other idioms may be better suited to commerce, technology, science, or finance, but Italian embodies something far greater and more universal: civilization itself. As I sit in the very heart of Rome, on a hill sanctified as a seat of power, law, and government for almost three millennia, within steps of some of the world’s greatest art treasures, I wholeheartedly agree that Italian is indeed the language of humanity—and therefore everyone’s mother tongue.
Later, in a conversation with Alessandro Masi, La Dante’s Segretario Generale, I trip over my tenses and apologize for my imperfect Italian. “Non fa niente,” he assures me. “You speak better Italian than most Italians.” At first, I simply accept the compliment. But on my way back to my apartment, I stop at a supermercato for a few items and inadvertently draw the ire of the harried cashier for not having any small coins. Incapable of retrieving a single word to counter her tongue-lashing, I meekly grab my sacchetto and dash out the door. Mother tongue, indeed!
Once again I have slipped headlong into the gap between the two parallel forms of the national language: italiano scritto (written Italian), the formal, literature-based language taught in schools, and italiano parlato (spoken or vernacular Italian), the feisty modern vernacular that no one masters in a classroom. Thanks to obligatory education and the mass media, the two have become more similar than ever before, but at times my formal Italian makes me feel like Petrarch in a pizzeria. Just as it has for the last five hundred years, la questione della lingua—the question of the language, of which form is better, purer, more important, more Italian—rages on.
“We are still asking what language to write in because we still do not write in the language we speak,” observes Raffaele Simone, director of the Department of Linguistics at Università Roma Tre. “Every Italian’s Italian is different. This makes the language as rich in flavors and varieties as Italian cooking, but it makes foreigners crazy.” The phrase fare impazzire perfectly describes how I feel on Italy’s streets.
One friend describes the Italian of many of his countrymen as a macedonia, a mix of all kinds of verbiage casually tossed together. I learned this use of the word from Lina, the cook at Monte Vibiano Vecchio, who once asked me (I thought) if I liked the war-torn little nation, a former province of the Roman Empire. It turns out that Italians call a fresh fruit salad a macedonia, perhaps—Lina speculates—because it’s been chopped up into little pieces so often.
Italian too has been diced and spliced, purged and purified by linguistic law enforcers, none more zealous than the Fascists, who took their name from the bundles of sticks, called fasces, that symbolized power in ancient Rome. In 1923 Mussolini’s government levied a tax on foreign words used in shop signs. At the beginning of the Second World War, a law banned them altogether. Posters blazed, “Italiani, boicottate le parole straniere!” (“Italians, boycott foreign words!”) No one pointed out that boicottate was itself foreign, derived from the name of Captain Charles C. Boycott, the first victim of this treatment in Ireland. “Boycott” had passed from English, to French, to Italian.
Under Fascism an Italian chauffeur became an autista; soccer turned into calcio; a bar was rechristened qui si beve (here one drinks). Shakespeare’s name, like other foreign appellations, had to be pronounced as if it were Italian: Shah-kay-spay-ah-ray. In 1933 the journalist Paolo Monelli published Barbarian Domination: Five Hundred Foreign Expressions Examined, Attacked, and Banished from the Language with Old and New Argument, with the History and Etymology of the Words and with Anecdotes to Entertain the Reader. By the second edition in 1943, the list had grown to 650. In the preface, the author explained that he was campaigning for “pride and dignity.”
A strong people “do not pick up foreign rubbish,” Monelli declared. “The pollution of language is usually the work of people who are ignorant, presumptuous, slavish.” A Fascist law prohibiting the “slavish” practice of giving foreign Christian names to Italian children stayed on the books until 1966. My Italian-born friend Narriman’s parents, who named her for an Egyptian queen, were told that no Christian name ends with an n. Hers went down in the municipal records as Narrima, although the young priest who baptized her (at his first christening) used Narriman for the church register.
Fascism also tried to exterminate la malerba dialettale (the dialect weeds) that it saw as sullying the purity of the national language. In effect the restrictions on dialect silenced generations of Italians of all social and educational levels, including nobles, who spoke mainly in the language they heard in their homes and villages. “For my parents, speaking dialect was like using your right hand,” a friend explains. “Following the rules of italiano standard, even if you had a university degree, was like using your left.”
Today, according to Italy’s national statistics bureau, 55 percent of Italians still use dialect some or most of the time when they are with family and friends. A quarter use dialect even when speaking to strangers. Almost all Italians, including those whose parents forbade them to speak dialect when growing up, know at least a few words. Ragazzo may be the proper Italian word for child, but a “kid” remains a bimbo in Florence, a citano in Siena, a puteo in Venice, a figgeu in Savona (Liguria), a burdel or burdlin in Romagna, a frut in Friuli, and a quatraro in some southern dialects (Dante mentions this word in his treatise on language, De Vulgari Eloquentia [Vernacular Eloquence]).
A far greater threat to contemporary Italian are verbal immigrants, say some purists and politicians (who set up an Allarme Lingua commission after the European Union snubbed Italian to select English, French, and German as its principal languages). To protest such linguistic discrimination, Prime Minister Berlusconi has advised his ministers to walk out of European Union meetings in which they are forced to speak another language and to boycott those that provide no documentation in Italian.
According to Cristina, my Florence language history tutor, foreign words make up about 10 percent of the Italian vocabulary, but only .3 percent have entered the language without change or adaptation. I learned a German acquisition in a restaurant when I was fiddling with a turn-tilt window with a hinge on the lower edge. A waiter volunteered to help me with the thingamajig, which he called a vasistas, from the query “Was ist das?” A friend taught me a Russian import when she accused me of being a stacanovista (workaholic), from Stachanov, a Russian miner who introduced new techniques to increase productivity.
American English has been infiltrating the Italian language ever since the Allies invaded the peninsula during World War II. (Italians still call chewing gum gomma americana.) Linguists estimate that several thousand English terms have shouldered their way into Italian, including “computer,” “software,” “bestseller,” “killer,” “manager,” “boyfriend,” “cowboy,” “popcorn,” “massmedia” (one word), “playboy,” “coffee break,” “stress,” “babysitter,” “flirt,” and “weekend.” But Italian ingenuity has cast some English words in somewhat different roles. A golf refers to a pullover; a mister, a coach of a soccer team; a smoking, a tuxedo; a spot, a commercial; and a fiction, a film for TV. From American politics journalists took “ticket” for a party’s presidential and vice presidential candidates and created tricket for three contenders in an Italian election.
At times I find Italian’s “English” words more confounding than its home grown ones. Instead of going for a jog, for instance, I must fare il footing, a term that may have entered Italian from a nineteenth-century Spanish word for hiking. Even Italians get confused by what some call the “Englishing” of their language. When a beauty salon dubbed itself “Top one,” Italians read the name as topone, or big rat, and didn’t venture inside.
/> Some words that sound English actually have Italian roots. “Snob” may date back to Renaissance Florence, when the burgeoning middle class sought acceptance in the upper strata of local society. To distinguish between the true noble families and the nouveau riche, census-takers wrote s.nob (senza nobiltà, for “without nobility”) next to the names of social climbers (known in contemporary Italian as arrampicatori sociali). Seemingly all-American “jeans” started off as blu di Genova for the color of the denim used by its sailors on their boats. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term migrated into French as bleu de Genes before its global reincarnation as jeans.
Despite the ubiquity of nonsense English words (“Meating,” for a restaurant; “Boomerang” for a trucking company, “Shopping U” for a store), slightly more than half of Italian’s linguistic base—its 10,000 most-used words—dates back to the 1300s and 1400s. I heard firsthand evidence of this recently when trash piled up on the streets of Naples and precipitated a national crisis. Listening to reports on the Italian nightly news (also broadcast in the United States), I kept hearing one of the first words I learned in Italian echoing through the outraged protests of citizens, the alarmed warnings of health experts, and the ranting of the politicians: spazzatura.
Years ago at a class at the ItaLingua Institute in San Francisco, I entered the room with an empty paper coffee cup in hand.
“Spazzatura?” the cheery young teacher asked.
“Sì,” I responded, certain that I wanted whatever this spray of sibilant syllables offered. Then I tracked her outstretched arm, pointing to the wastebasket in the corner.
“Trash,” she said in English.
After class I used the school’s massive etymological dictionary to trace the word back to its root: spazzare (“sweep” or, in some contexts, “wipe out”), which appeared in Boccaccio’s works. Over time it sprouted offshoots such as spazzamento, a good sweeping; spazzatina, a dusting; spazzola, a brush; and spazzolino da denti, a toothbrush.
Other Italian words have remained in the vocabulary but completely changed their meanings. As an example, Professor Giuseppe Patota cites le veline, the scantily clad young women who traipse about on Italian television shows. Originally velina referred to very light, soft paper, he tells me, and later the tissue-thin sheets of onion paper used for carbon copies of typewritten pages. During the Fascist regime, government censors issued directives specifying what newspapers could or could not report. Thin-sheeted copies (veline) went to editors; the originals remained in state archives. After the war various ministries continued to send lightweight veline not just to newspapers but to RAI, the government-sponsored television network.
In the 1980s a program on Silvio Berlusconi’s private Canale 5 that satirized RAI news shows featured sexy dancers in flimsy outfits who carried veline to the announcers. They became known as veline, a name now used for all the leggy girls (and there are many) who appear regularly on Italian television. Two variations on velina—velinesco (slim and coy) and velinismo (behavior typical of a velina)—appear in a recent edition of Parole nuove: un dizionario di neologismi dai giornali (New Words: A Dictionary of Neologisms from Newspapers).
This compendium of linguistic inventions provides fascinating insights into the ever-evolving Italian vernacular. Some English words, such as “Bluetooth,” “crossover,” “e-payment,” and “podcasting,” look, sound, and mean the same in Italian. Italians give others a top spin. A blogger becomes a bloggista. Hollywoodità captures the glitz and glamour of movie stardom. Another invention—marilynizzarsi—describes someone who imitates the eternal star Marilyn Monroe. Minidollaro all too accurately summarizes the state of the weakened American dollar. Other entries recycle traditional Italian words to describe thoroughly modern things, such as lampadarsi (from lampada for lamp, a fifteenth-century word the fanatical friar Savonarola used) for tanning under an ultraviolet light.
I’ve become a regular user of one particular neologism: mes-saggiata, referring to the sending of a text or SMS (the abbreviation used worldwide, including Italy, for Short Message Service) greeting. The very first one I received consisted of just four symbols: “dv 6?” I had to call Cristina so she could explain that she was asking, “Dove sei?” “Where are you?” (Italian messagers use the numeral six, which also translates as sei, for “you.”) My SMS vocabulary now includes ke (che—what), ki (chi—who), km (come—how), and smpr (sempre—always). However, the longest message I’ve ever sent was “Dm c sent” for “Domani ci sentiamo,” “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
I’ve had a much harder time struggling to understand the paroloni (big words) spun by politicians and bureaucrats. Time and again I have pondered an official notice, such as an explanation of why the post office is once again closed in the middle of a workday. “Non è italiano,” said an older woman puzzling over the words with me in Assisi, “è ostrogoto”—a reference to the unintelligible language of the Ostrogoth barbarians who captured Rome in the fifth century.
The government itself has declared war on arcane, overly ornate phraseology and launched Progetto Chiaro (Project Clear) to eliminate bureaucratese. I see no evidence of progress, however. Beppe Severgnini, Italy’s national wit, has cataloged some of the verbal monstrosities spawned by Italy’s recent political woes. His “vocabolario della crisi” (vocabulary of the crisis) includes a neologism, parlamentarizzazione, the act of carrying the crisis into parliament, that he deems so horrible that he recommends infanticidio. Termovalorizzatore, a word substituted for the politically charged inceneritori (garbage incinerators or people who operate them), strikes him as “il pudore verbale italiano” (Italian verbal prudery).
Despite such egregious excesses, I have no fears for the fate of a language that has survived invasions, ruthless inquisitors, foreign tyrants, strutting dictators, corrupt politicians, the European Union, ubiquitous English, and tourist hordes from around the world. Italian was born of an insatiable hunger to express, communicate, and connect. Nothing and no one can quench this urge.
Italian also has new linguistic heroes, latter-day versions of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Leon Battista Alberti. Professors Valeria della Valle and Giuseppe Patota have been championing the cause of keeping Italian bello through a series of books with titles—Il salvalingua, Il salvastile, Il salvaitaliano, Il nuovo salvalingu—that are plays on the the word “save” or salva, as in salvagente for a life preserver. Their academic colleagues initially responded to their efforts to improve common speech with what della Valle describes, flicking her nose upward with a finger, as “molto snobbismo” and complaints about divulgazione (vulgarization) of the language. Yet their lively practical guides have been selling as briskly as gelato in the summer.
“Italians do care about their language, and they want to speak it well,” says della Valle, “but even for Italians, Italian is very old, complex, and difficult.” I dubbi (doubts) about the best or correct way of using the language are the stuff of heated dinner conversations as well as popular television programs. I turned to her to clarify one dubbio that Bob and I have debated with Italians for years: at what hour of the day do you stop saying “Buongiorno” (Good day) and start using “Buonasera” (Good evening) or “Buonanotte” (Good night)?
In Tuscany, if we said “Buongiorno” a minute after noon, people would often respond with “Buonasera.” In Rome we kept hearing “Buongiorno” well into the afternoon. La Professoressa’s rule of thumb: il buongiorno until lunchtime (likely to be later in Rome), la buonasera afterward, and la buonanotte only before going to bed. But if an Italian injects a buonasera in the middle of a conversation, don’t get up to leave. It’s also an ironic way of signaling the end of a task or discussion—or of the impossibility of ever sorting out a thorny problem.
Della Valle found herself in a thorny dilemma in the 1970s when she got her first job after graduation preparing entries for a grand new dictionary, Il vocabolario della lingua italiana. (At our first meeting, she led me into her book-lined den to show
me its massive four volumes.) Her boss, who had dedicated his life to organizing and cataloging Italian, explained her tasks with ever-growing uneasiness. When she reached the words beginning with ca (the initial letters of some of Italians oldest scatological terms), he said, reddening and coughing, she would have to pass the material to him because the contents “non era adatto a una donna” (were not suitable for a woman).
Della Valle never forgot how angry and embarrassed these brutte parole made her feel. “It was the first time I realized that Italian, until very recently, has always been a man’s language and conveyed a completely masculine vision of reality. Ever since I have been trying to change things, at the very least to make sure that la donna [woman] is no longer defined as femmina dell’uomo [feminine of man].”
In 2008 Nicoletta Maraschio, a professor of the history of the Italian language at the University of Florence, shattered the glass ceiling of Italian letters by becoming la prima donna Presidente, “the first woman president,” of L’Accademia della Crusca. Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci, a nineteenth-century writer, poet, and political activist, had become the first female member 137 years previously. On the occasion of this honor, Ferrucci wrote Della necessità di conservare alla nostra lingua e alla nostra letteratura l’indole schi-ettamente italiana (Of the necessity of preserving in our language and our literature the true Italian character).
On a sunny September Saturday in Rome, Bob and I confronted the full range of the Italian character. He wanted to see the two-thousand-year-old Ara Pacis Augustae, the altar of imperial peace to honor the long Pax Augusta that had allowed Roman civilization to flourish. I wanted to go to an exhibit on Valentino’s forty-five years in fashion. Both were housed under the same roof—the Ara Pacis Museum, designed by the American architect Richard Meier and generally derided by Romans as resembling a mammoth gas station.