Italian language under siege from imported English words, warns Florence academy

The guardians of the Italian language have accused the country’s education ministry of packing a new school text with dozens of English words and phrases, in the latest row over the growing hold of English over the language of Dante.

The Accademia della Crusca, which keeps an ever-watchful eye on the creeping use of English, said it was “deeply concerned” that the text about entrepreneurship in business was peppered with words such as team-building, start-up, case history, coaching and stakeholder, when there were Italian equivalents that could have been chosen.

“The adoption of English phrases and expressions is no longer a one-off but has become institutionalised,” the academy, which was founded in Florence in 1582, said.

The education ministry should have shown more regard for “Italian language and culture,” it said in a statement.

“Rather than teaching students about entrepreneurship, the text seems to promote the systematic abandonment of the Italian language.”

Claudio Marazzini, the president of the academy, said the syllabus was full of English “business-speak” that would be hard for Italian students to comprehend.

The venerable Florentine institution has long lamented that Italian is under assault from a rising tide of English words, just as the Academie Francaise has fought a rear guard action against English creeping into French.

Many of the English words adopted by Italians relate to the worlds of business, technology and social media, such as selfie, car-sharing, spending review and strategy.

The meaning of some English words has been mangled almost beyond recognition to native speakers.

Mutated or oddly out of context English words and phrases that have crept into Italian include “sexy shop”, meaning sex shop, "mister", meaning a football coach and "baby parking", meaning crèche.

When the Italian government set up reception centres in the south of Italy to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of migrants who have crossed the Mediterranean from Libya, they called them “hot spots” instead of using the Italian term “centri d’accoglienza”.

Prof Marazzini complained last yearthat when Italians use the English word “location”, they effectively dispense with three perfectly good equivalents in their native tongue – luogo, sito and posto.

The education minister rejected the academy’s criticism of the school text.

Valeria Fedeli said her department was committed to promoting Italian but also believed it was vital for schoolchildren to start learning English from a young age.

Italian borrowed words from many other languages, not least Latin and Arabic, the minister said. It was inevitable that some English would be adopted as well.