A Quick Look at Some Anglicisms in the Italian Language During COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has unexpectedly entered our lives, causing social changes and leaving its traces in the language, too, through words that have forcefully and suddenly entered our lives like the virus itself. In Italian most of these words are anglicisms, which have been the most numerous borrowings since the 20th century.

In this paper the focus was on anglicisms such as COVID hospital, hub, lockdown, smart working, distanziamento sociale, delivery, rider, green pass and recovery fund, which, in our opinion, have been widely used in the media to describe the pandemic period to the detriment of their Italian equivalents. The analysis focused on the frequency of anglicisms and their Italian equivalents in the electronic versions of the newspapers La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera, and the reasons for their wide diffusion. The results confirm their dominance in journalistic language and suggest their imposition over the Italian variants. Initially, the influx was presumably stimulated by the urgency of work. Their emergence, on the other hand, was due to different factors: in the case of hub, delivery and rider because of their brevity and compactness; in the case of COVID hospital because of a more restricted semantics; in the case of lockdown and distanziamento sociale because they are umbrella terms; in the case of smart working because of the prestige that the English language has in Italian society; in the case of green pass and recovery fund because they were introduced into Italian journalistic language directly through foreign media.