“Che scìcco!”: i forestierismi di moda in un vocabolario dialettale degli anni Venti

Abstract

This paper aims to illustrate and analyse the incidence of foreign words inherent to the special language of fashion in the Vocabolario domestico del dialetto foggiano (1929) by Carlo Villani (Foggia 1855 - Naples 1931). Although it has been published during the Twenties, a period notoriously hostile to dialects, the vocabulary follows the Gentilian cultural climate, well-disposed towards the works of enhancement of local linguistic heritage, which, especially for school, reach their peak in the 1920s. Furthermore, the vocabulary is the latest heir to a municipal and family lexicographic tradition, which flourished in the mid-nineteenth century, on the model of Basilio Puoti’s Vocabolario domestico napoletano e toscano. However, if the forerunner Saggio di vocabolario familiare (1841) follows Puoti’s purist thought, explicitly criticizing foreign words, the Vocabolario domestico del dialetto foggiano lemmatises them by showing their productivity in local speech; it provides interesting information for the history of language and customs at the same time (as can be seen from the glossary offered in this paper, properly commented). Nonetheless, this tolerance seems confined to the dialectal speech only: the translations proposed are mostly hyperonyms or words characterised by a greater semantic extension, which sacrifice the more precise semantic of the original forms, while compromising the memory of the referent.