Italy’s identity, culture and language

Form and beauty, joy and endurance in the face of suffering, a sense of what’s real, a dislike for certain forms of rhetoric, a dissociation from abstraction and the rejection of a “psychological tradition”: these are some of the distinctive traits that over the centuries have contributed to shaping the Italian identity. To be clear, we are talking of the identity that fascinated both well-known and unknown figures of the European fashionable set and led them – almost overwhelmed by some kind of categorical imperative – to undertake the celebrated “Journey through Italy”. And although this was principally the route through which the Italian identity took shape, over the centuries the Italian language has also traveled a parallel journey which has been a little out of the ordinary and marked by varying fortunes. While from the time of Petrarch to the greats of the 1500s the Italian language was famous throughout the world, including as the bearer – particularly during the Renaissance – of a political and economic supremacy that was universally recognized, in the centuries that followed it underwent a slow decline. By the 1800s, Leopardi himself acknowledged the want of a language. It then fell to him and Manzoni to reinvent it with the greatest of ingenuity. From that “rebuilding” of the language in the 1800s, we come to the modern age. Today, the language, which in any event expresses the national identity, is going through a potentially promising stage, filled with richness, suppleness, flexibility and a great melodic bent. It does, however, need to guard against serious threats, including standardization, the dumbing down and impoverishment of vocabulary, excessive Anglicization and the growth of various areas of sector-specific jargon, particularly the longwinded and rhetorical language used in legal instruments, the slang used in the area of technology, the paltry, ungrammatical, puerile and emotive language of certain trash TV programs and the somewhat cloying terminology of Anglophone corporate-speak.The roundtable participants noted that, in reality, there is no single recipe for preserving and promoting the Italian identity and language. It is, however, possible to start by debunking certain myths. While it is true that the garbage crisis in Naples has done harm to the country’s image, it is also true that the Italian identity abroad is marked by strength and success. Creativity, fashion, design and the entrepreneurial flair of the major brands are proof that Italy’s image is far from being limited to “trash”. Growth in the demand for Italian language courses overseas also stems from this kind of success. Indeed, the number of people taking Italian courses is on the rise. At the same time, the importance that immigrants attribute to language in terms of integration should not be forgotten. Speaking correct and fluent Italian is not just, according to some, a question of deriving real intellectual gratification, but also necessary in order to command the respect in everyday private and professional life that it would otherwise be very difficult for an immigrant to gain.