ITALIAN WORDS IN ENGLISH
Americans use a lot of Italian words, for sure more than one can even imagine. If the majority of these words have spread in the past, the phenomenon is incredibly vital even today, especially in gastronomy. The list is almost endless. According to the Istituto Treccani1Istituto Treccani is the name with which the Institute of the Italian Encyclopaedia is most known., the Italian words used abroad are more than twenty-thousand. Maybe you can’t always realize that they are Italian words, but for sure you know them, they are part of your vocabulary. I am not talking about the obvious pizza, cappuccino, and unfortunately also mafia. No, I am talking about words like piano, graffiti, paparazzi, propaganda and many more that are Italian loanwords and keep in English the same meaning and spelling. Of course, they don’t always sound the same when spoken by an Italian speaker2During this course you will learn about pronunciation in more details..
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Click it to find out how to pronounce the above Italian (and English) words in Italian.
Activity The following terms are all Italian loanwords: ballerina, opera, piano, chiaroscuro, motto, barista, espresso, ravioli.Try to pronounce them as an Italian. UseSpeech to textto check your pronunciation.
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ActivityDiscover 10 Italian words used differently in English by checking theLocal.itsite.
ENGLISH WORDS IN ITALIAN As you can see, even before you have started studying the language, you already ‘master’ a great number of Italian words. It couldn’t have started any better! And you will be even more surprised to know that also an incredible amount of English words is used by Italians in their daily conversation. Maybe they don’t speak good English, but for sure they use more Anglicism than French, German, or Spanish people when they speak their native language. Of course, old English-loanwords, or terms without close equivalents like “bar,” “sport,” “computer” make perfect sense, but the constant use of “location,” “fashion,” “meeting,” “topic” and many more is, according to experts, troubling and alarming since Italian have perfect and “beautiful” equivalent. The phenomenon is nowadays so big that a new idiom was recently identified, the so-called Itanglese3Itanglese indicates the Italian language characterized by frequent and arbitrary recourse to English words..
ActivityCheck these300Englishwordsused in Italian and watch the video below to have a clear idea of the “Itanglese” phenomenon.
THE CASE OF THE “COMPUTER VERBS”
With the arrival of the WEB and the amazing success of Social Networks, English is having an incredible influence on Italian. Indeed, Italian has not only adopted a lot of English nouns into its vocabulary, accepting them in their original form (mouse, hacker, etc.), but it has also created a whole class of new Italian verbs by taking the English equivalent and giving them an Italian form. As you can see all acquire the first conjugation suffix –are4You will soon learn about verb conjugations.: bloggare, formattare, zippare, loggare, twittare, cliccare, downloadare, etc.
If the majority of these words have spread in the past, the phenomenon is incredibly vital even today, especially in gastronomy. The list is almost endless. According to the Istituto Treccani1Istituto Treccani is the name with which the Institute of the Italian Encyclopaedia is most known., the Italian words used abroad are more than twenty-thousand. Maybe you can’t always realize that they are Italian words, but for sure you know them, they are part of your vocabulary. I am not talking about the obvious pizza, cappuccino, and unfortunately also mafia. No, I am talking about words like piano, graffiti, paparazzi, propaganda and many more that are Italian loanwords and keep in English the same meaning and spelling. Of course, they don’t always sound the same when spoken by an Italian speaker2During this course you will learn about pronunciation in more details..
daily conversation. Maybe they don’t speak good English, but for sure they use more Anglicism than French, German, or Spanish people when they speak their native language. Of course, old English-loanwords, or terms without close equivalents like “bar,” “sport,” “computer” make perfect sense, but the constant use of “location,” “fashion,” “meeting,” “topic” and many more is, according to experts, troubling and alarming since Italian have perfect and “beautiful” equivalent. The phenomenon is nowadays so big that a new idiom was recently identified, the so-called Itanglese3Itanglese indicates the Italian language characterized by frequent and arbitrary recourse to English words..