Pseudoanglicisms in Italian: Concept and Usage

Abstract

AbstractEveryone notices and many people lament the seemingly vast and increasing number of English terms in Italian. But appearances can be deceptive and in a recent study I concluded that, although terms of the order of boss, doping, killer, look, self-service, and sponsor ‘jump off the page’ of an Italian newspaper or magazine when they are used, as a total proportion of Italian linguistic usage such unadapted anglicisms are relatively rare, even in the daily press and the popular weekly and monthly magazines where they are most commonly found. My statistical enquiry showed that such terms seem to account for an average of 0.77 per cent of alllexical items used in these publications, an apparent increase of some seventy-five per cent over figures produced in the 1960s but still representing an incidence of no more than about one item in one-hundred and fifty. So the incidence still seems to be a very low one. These ‘crude’ anglicisms do of course only represent a minority of the recent neologisms Itali...