Italy Language Part 3

It should be remembered that precisely in relation to the great diffusion (already around the First World War) of foreign words in Italian, in the Fascist period there was a real fight against exotic forms, reaching the maximum of violence especially following the economic sanctions to Italy, determined by the war in Ethiopia. In the context of the fight against foreign words, the Lei was forbidden, as an allocutive form because it was perceived (erroneously) as a reflection of Spanish domination (“feminine, ungrammatical, foreign”). The antilei action lasted just five years, so the desired result was not obtained, on the contrary the process of crisis of the you was accelerated., given that modern society cannot appreciate a form of courtesy, largely characterized in a class sense; on the other hand we are witnessing today in strong expansion U know of you. The fight against foreign words in most cases had no effect; in many cases, however, it has limited its expansion and spread Italian equivalents, as in the terminology of the most popular sport in Italy (football, corner kick, goal, and so on).

According to COLLEGESANDUNIVERSITIESINUSA.COM, the literary language reflects, naturally in a very mediated way, all that has been said about the common spoken and written language. Thus, for example, the abandonment of the archaizing lexicon in poetry is the effect not only of the various poetics of an impressionistic and realistic type, but also of the sentiment of a language used by ever larger masses of the population, that is, of a language well existing at outside of books and literary use.

For what is more strictly literary prose, between the two wars the prose of art dominates, the “beautiful page”, the “chapter” of the rondists, full of literary stylistic features (adjective preceding the noun, ternary procedure, alliteration, abstract and intellectualistic lexicon, albeit in a substantially modern syntax); meanwhile, Pirandello reaches a great speed of theatrical language, establishing a tradition of “spoken”, which will have a wide following both in the theater and in the cinema: think of the dense winks of the must I say type ?, we are fair, but see what!The new narrative that starts towards 1930, placing the emphasis more and more resolutely on the moral and social reality of everyday life, pushes towards medium and popular linguistic and stylistic solutions: the relations between language and dialects are tackled, with an extreme seriousness towards writing. On the one hand, the dialect is rejected, seen as the most obvious solution in tending to the popular, but also as the easiest and perhaps the most evasive, in its possibility of reaching a new Arcadia; on the other hand, we want to express popular nature and reality in a continuous work of linguistic elaboration of the popular roots of language. The fact is that there is now (as we have seen) more and more evident a popular parameter of spoken language (and not only of dialect),

The achievements of a humble and colloquial language, sometimes modest and trite, are undoubtedly of decisive importance and lasting effect: the nominal syntax is now established at all levels of Italian prose, highlighting the nouns with the most varied procedures technical, from placing them at the beginning of a sentence, to the use of con + noun in a modal-associative function, while verbs largely appear in their most invariable forms (infinitive, gerund, participle). It should be remembered, also in this quick profile, that already the newest part of the Nocturne(1921) by D’Annunzio is structured in an absolutely nominal way. Experimentalism, on the other hand, based on the mixing of dialects, technical languages, jargon, literary forms, had (regardless of its intentions and results) little relevance to the development of the contemporary Italian language: “the breaking of the linguistic conventions of the neo-capitalist society it only leads to experiments between groups of initiates united by often precarious ties “(Stussi). Moreover, in the polemical articles by PP Pasolini, between December 1964 and February 1965, his feeling of the “delay” of his prosastic experiences with regard to the tendency of the whole Italian situation towards a common linguistic type is very well understood. popular.

In the last half century the language of poetry almost suddenly dies as a special language that is consciously opposed in the writer himself to the language of prose. As is well known, still in Carducci and D’Annunzio the forms and words that were for centuries felt as typical of poetry (lunge, speme, beltà, alma, imago, giri, volea, saria, and so on). The subtle crepuscular satire to traditional poetic language (e.g. rhyming sleepy meriggiar with floor wax, the bygone age with salad, the hanging cemetery among the pastures with weeping over the male mustache, cited in Altieri-Biagi), and the futuristic verbal violence premise the more concrete linguistic and stylistic results of the poetry of the last half century, which tends, as a whole, to introduce everyday reality, sparse and essential, even in the lyric of the highest breath (“Farewell, whistles in the dark, nods, cough /and flaps lowered… “, by Montale). The literary presence in Ungaretti, Montale, Saba, Quasimodo is certainly very remarkable (without however poetic archaisms), but it must be judged in a context of key words usually taken from the common lexicon and daily. After the Second World War, the calibrated study of the word will tend to open up towards more discursive forms, to arrive at Pasolini’s best popular poems based on a real recitation. On the other hand, the solutions of the neo-avant-garde, for that which is of the language, produce an extremely artificial and conventional language, with nevertheless remarkable results in the collagesof clichés, of passages from the conversation, of the language of advertising, the extreme point of the assumption by literature of the informal linguistic magma that besieges us.

As regards the situation of the Italian language on a more strictly linguistic-territorial level, it should be remembered that, as a consequence of the outcome of the Second World War, most of the Italian-speaking residents of Istria take refuge in Italy; massive return of Italians from Libya and East Africa. Only in Somalia does the Italian language still retain some position of prestige: the reception of Italian words in Somali has been conspicuous, which has become the official language since 1973. In the last half century, not a few Italian words have entered foreign languages: fascism, anti- fascism, casts various on Duce ; espresso, pizza, pizzeria, vespa, lambretta, antiproton, technetus, dolce vita.

Italy Language 3