In Italian, the use of anglicisms is now so widespread as to seem completely natural, but it is enough to move a few hundred kilometers to notice the opposite phenomenon in Spain, where the computer becomes a organizerthe mouse a ratónthe jeans of vaqueros and even hot-dog is literally translated as hot perrito.
Linguistically, this comparison indicates two opposite attitudes: the Italian language shows a marked “passivity” and is significantly less conservative towards foreign terms, while Spanish adopts a protective position and aims to preserve the integrity of its lexicon.
But what are the reasons for this profound difference between two very similar languages? The simplest answer comes from the history experienced by the two European countries, where the Spanish Empire has always shown a more conservative attitude towards foreign linguistic influences, while Italian has always been less rigid and more perceptive.
Past and linguistic institutions in Italy and Spain
To understand this difference it is necessary to analyze the sociolinguistics, the discipline that studies the relationships between language and society, and the political history of the two countries.
Some linguists point out that Spanish is historically one imperial languagelike French and, clearly, English. Thanks to its diffusion in the past centuries in vast overseas territories following the colonial expansionsSpanish has for centuries “risked” fragmenting or “creolizing”, that is, transforming into a creole language: a stable idiom born from the contact of at least two different languages. From here a century is born attention from the political and intellectual class towards the unity of the language.
This attention was taken to extremes during the Franco regime (1939-1975), during which Spain imposed total dubbing and forced translation of foreign films and content into the Castilian language through Order of Defense of the Language (inspired by a similar law in fascist Italy in 1938) making Castilian dubbing mandatory for any foreign film and prohibiting the screening of films in the original language with subtitles. State censors edited the dialogue to fit the regime’s ideology, a control that subtitles would not have allowed to hide. Decades of systematic dubbing have consolidated the habit among Spanish citizens of translating or phonetically adapting any foreign term, creating strong resistance to the use of original language terms in everyday speech.
Italian, on the contrary, has reached thenational unity only in 1861 and has consolidated itself as a daily language spoken by the entire population in relatively recent times. Furthermore, the legacy of fascism generated the fear of linguistic purism in the post-war period, playing a fundamental role in treating the question of language with a different sensitivity compared to the Iberian country. During the twenty years of fascism, Italy applied a bitter fight against barbarism by imposing bans and taxes on foreign words, and the memory of this authoritarian imposition has generated a strong refusal towards any policy of unitary linguistic protection, perhaps seen with the fear of a return to an ideological purism of the language.
Finally, a fundamental difference lies in the way in which the two major linguistic control bodies in Italy and Spain operate. In Spain there are Real Academia Española (RAE) together with the Fundeu (Fundación del Español Urgente), two institutions with a strong prescriptive orientation with regards to the Spanish language, that is to say they establish rules and norms of correctnessready to propose and actively disseminate alternatives in Castilian. In Italy there is no state language policy: theCrusca Academy maintains a descriptive attitudeobserving and recording how the language changes, and simply recommends or suggests Italian options, without any binding power.
Which words become loans?
When two languages come into contact, a definite exchange of words occurs linguistic loanand the ways in which this is accepted change radically, distinguishing themselves into different categories based on their origin or function.
Many loans are welcomed in full (not being adapted), that is, it is a foreign word imported exactly in its original form. Italian almost always prefers this route: unadapted loans represent approximately 98% of anglicisms in Italian dictionaries. When a loan comes adapted, instead, the foreign word comes modified according to graphic and phonetic rules of the target language.
Spanish makes extensive use of these adapted loans, which reach 41%-48% of the total: speakers modify the spelling and pronunciation of words like champú (from shampoo), steak (from beefsteak, which the Italians also adapted with “steak”) or esmoquin (from tuxedo).
It is not simply the superficial aspect that weighs on the adaptation of the loan: the Spaniard makes heavy use of the structural cast or translation, a mechanism in which the structure or meaning of a foreign word is recreated using its own material. This is how translations are born ratón (mouse) or adaptations of international acronyms such as OTAN (NATO) ed EE.UU. (USA, lit. United Stateswith a double letter to indicate the plural).
Finally, it should also be underlined that borrowing is often useful to indicate a completely new object or concept that does not exist in the target culture (the referent), in most cases concerning new trends or technologies, such as airbags, bit or radar. In this case we are talking about loan of necessityand it must be said that a vital language tends over time to create its own alternatives through calques or neologisms.
When a foreign term is adopted, despite already having a perfect local correspondent available, for reasons linked to fashion, prestige or the search for brevity, we then speak of luxury loanswhich Italian willingly abuses: think of leader/boss, weekend/weekend, okay/okay or location/place, often leading to the progressive replacement of traditional Italian terms.
Other languages and cases
The Spanish tendency to translate under the pressure of regulatory institutions and the acceptance of Italian to the foreign lexicon is not an isolated case because there are other languages that behave similarly. Just to give some examples:
The French adopts a strongly protectionist model led by the State andFrench Academy, through specific laws (such as the Toubon Law) that impose the use of French in official documents and the media, creating ad hoc terms such as ordinateur (computer) e courriel (e-mail). Another Romance language that handles loanwords similarly to Spanish is Portuguesewhich tends to adapt the graphic and phonetic component of the loans (e.g. futebol for football, delete for delete) or to resort to indigenous translations (computer).
The Germanon the other hand, shows a much more receptive pragmatic approach towards loanwords, especially those deriving from English (it often integrates English verbs into its grammatical conjugation, such as downloaden or chatten), while keeping alive the tendency to compose indigenous words in parallel with loanwords.
However, if you look outside Europe, you will notice that the trend is dissimilar.
The Chinese, having a logographic writing system (based on characters and not on a phonetic alphabet), it cannot directly import the letters of the Latin alphabet and must therefore almost always resort to semantic calques (e.g. 電腦 diànnǎo, literally “electric brain”, to indicate the computer) or complex phonetic adaptations based on the sounds of the characters.
The Japanese, instead, it uses a syllabic alphabet created specifically for foreign words (Katakana). This allows you to import a huge amount of anglicisms, but adapt them rigidly to the Japanese syllabic structure (e.g. konpiūtā for computers, basukettobōru for basketball). THE’Arabic is based on a system of consonant roots: the Academies of the Arabic language prefer the translation or semantic extension of traditional roots (e.g. hāsūb for computer, derived from the root of calculus), although several direct borrowings penetrate informal speech.
Nowadays in a globalized world every language has, in some way, the possibility of influencing others by transmitting its own terms and concepts. Such transmission is inevitable if you are constantly connected from all over the world. Consequently, each language and each country will choose their own way to deal with it: there are those who erect institutional entities to assimilate the foreign term to their own sounds or those who, like Italian (which perhaps for some is a little lazy, let’s face it), opens the doors to direct borrowing while maintaining the original form, “without beating around the bush”.
