Abstract
Linguistic contact manifests itself primarily in the vocabulary, giving rise to phenomena of loanwords of various kinds. Like few other languages, Italian has had and continues to play a prominent role as a contact language. As a consequence many Italian loanwords can be found in the world’s languages, enriching both sectorial languages and the common vocabulary. The preferred place to document lexical influences from other idioms are dictionaries, especially dictionaries of loanwords, now available in digital format. A new type are parallel digital repertoires such as the Osservatorio degli Italianismi nel Mondo (OIM), which, based on interconnected databases, make it possible to observe the importance of the phenomenon in a given language and to make interlinguistic comparisons with respect to the results and specific factors of historical-cultural contacts. The contribution describes the phenomenology of Italianisms, the methodology and structure of the database, and some exemplary cases of borrowings from Italian by other languages, including German.
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