Italy has a law to protect and promote its historical, artistic and landscape heritage. It has a law to protect and promote the country's industrial and artisan excellence throughout the world, preventing counterfeiting and facilitating the marketing of Italian products in the world. It has a law to protect and promote the culture of its linguistic minorities. But it has no law to protect and promote the Italian language.
At least until today, as a group of citizens decided to send one to parliament bill for Italian.
The fact that a law can deal with our language at any level immediately evokes in many Italians the specter of Fascist legislation, which prohibited foreign words by decree and imposed translations for every guest. Fortunately, however, that is not the only way: there are language policies in many democratic countries, such as Spain, France or Switzerland, to stay close to us. But what exactly is a language policy? We can define it as the set of policies adopted by a state to manage the languages spoken on its territory. It can include various tools, such as the recognition of the official status of a specific language, the obligation of its teaching in schools, its promotion abroad, up to the encouragement of the formation of neologisms to keep the vocabulary updated.
Historically, the decision to adopt language policies has often been dictated by the desire to protect minority languages with respect to the national context, think for example of bilingualism in South Tyrol or Catalonia. But in recent decades, even countries that speak strong and widespread languages worldwide, such as French or Spanish, have adopted policies to protect their languages. The obvious cause is the advance of English as a world lingua franca, such as to influence all other languages and cultures on the planet.The presence of a de facto lingua franca certainly has many practical advantages, in economic, scientific exchanges, or in tourism. . But it also represents a threat to cultural plurality, since it risks invading the space that other languages have on their territories of origin, making them retreat in use. We remember in fact that a language can be defined as "a dialect that has made a career". In Italy it was the Tuscan vernacular that followed this path, until it became a language, Italian, used in the political, administrative, philosophical, academic, economic, technical-scientific fields and so on.
Now Italy is effectively "demoting" its language, making them take big steps backwards in their career. From 2018, research projects of significant national interest (Prin) requesting public funding must be submitted in English. Even though these are projects of national importance and also in the case of humanities; this means that a research project on Dante Alighieri's work would have to be presented in English to be funded by the Italian state. In 2012 the Politecnico di Milano, a state university funded with public money, declared English the "official language of ateneo ”and has decided to abolish all specialist degree and doctoral courses in Italian, keeping them only in English. Three different judicial decisions have established that Italian cannot be eliminated without criteria from all university courses. Despite this, in 2020 out of 40 specialist courses at the Polytechnic, 27 were only in English. And where Italian remains in use, its lexicon fills up more and more with "raw", unadapted English terms spread by politicians and newspapers. Among the neo-Latin-speaking countries, only Italy felt the need to import the word “lockdown” to speak of closure and confinement. And his government then launched the "State Cashback to Favor Cashless Purchases". Recent reforms approved by the Italian Parliament are called the Jobs Act and Family Act, and the political discussion has been very heated on flat tax, sugar tax, plastic tax and web tax. The unexpected news is that the new president, Mario Draghi, has emphasized this abuse of Anglicisms with a joke during one of his speeches, a few months ago: “Who knows why we always have to use all of these English words... "he asked himself.
If even a person like Draghi, well accustomed to working in international contexts speaking excellent English, has noticed this phenomenon, perhaps the time is ripe for a collective reflection that will lead to finally elaborating a balanced and serious linguistic policy in favor of Italian. And this is the goal of some citizens, supported by a collective called "Italian activists", who have decided to exploit Article 50 of the Italian Constitution, which allows citizens to submit petitions to parliament to examine proposals for law or other requests. The proposal therefore arises from the bottom and is divided into 11 points, characterized by very few restrictions and many calls to raise the awareness of citizens and institutions. In fact, the language "makes it who speaks it" and everyone must be free to speak and write as he pleases, but we must be aware that everyone's choices, as always, influence everyone. Also in the linguistic field. The text, submitted to the two houses of Parliament last March 22, was assigned two days later to the VII Senate Commission, and is now awaiting discussion. It is not taken for granted that it will be discussed, neither in the Senate nor in the House. If it is, it will then be necessary for one or more parliamentarians to decide to bring it to the courtroom. Therefore the promoters are trying to gather as many adhesions as possible around the proposal, through a collection of signatures. It is possible to read the complete text of the proposal e subscribe to this page.
An initiative that has a very difficult path ahead of it, but which could mark an unprecedented signal of attention by Italian institutions to their language, which seems more loved abroad - by foreigners and descendants of Italians - than at home .
