Computers Technos: I no longer write in Italian, but in “e-Lister”

“Along with writing revenge and triumph informality (remember the controversy on the abuse of the” you “of Umberto Eco?), The other element that characterizes the Italian of the third millennium is the ‘glocalization’ of lexicon…”.
To take stock of the many open questions related to the evolution of Italian at the time of the web and social, ilLibraio.it interviewed the linguist Joseph Antonelli: “The e-Lister is a different variety from Italian traditionally understood wrote … ”

If the summer is for many the opportunity to leave a little ‘go, even using vocabulary and syntax are not always supervised, September brings a lot to deal with exams university, with the school, with teaching, or simply with the world of work.
to take stock of a number of open questions concerning the controversial evolution of our language, we interviewed Giuseppe Antonelli , Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cassino and busy talking to Italian on many fronts, including the much followed transmission of Radio 3 , “the language beats” . Not only on these issues Antonelli has published, among others, However, even Leopardi said bad words. The Italian as I have never told (Mondadori, 2014), and on September 8 will be back in bookstores with A real Italian. The language in which we live (Rizzoli).

Joseph Antonelli

In a very interesting and recent collection of acts of the conference, the e-Lister (edited by Sergio Lubello, Franco Cesati publisher, 2016), in his eponymous essay spoke about this new language variant, which is taking place, marked by a point diamesico of view, diafasico (or diastratic). In his view, it is implementing a written language revolution?
“What happened in the last twenty years in the history of our language is undoubtedly a revolution. For the first time, in fact, the Italian is found to be not only spoken but also written daily by the majority of Italians. A novelty seemingly paradoxical, given that the Italian has lived for centuries almost exclusively as a written language. In glaring fact, if you think that the Italian written has always been strong in its codification but weak in its spread, first hampered by illiteracy, then the domain of audiovisual media. But now, having conquered the use spoken (at the expense of the dialect), the national language has finally conquered the use of mass written (at the expense of non-use). In the first case the credit has been largely of television; in the second, all of telematics. The phenomenon is visible to all: thanks to telematics many people who until twenty years ago would not have written a line, now they produce and consume every day an impressive body – albeit fragmentary and almost atomized – typed texts. And this results in the loss of coordinates that had characterized and influenced the writing for centuries.
The e-Lister is in fact a different variety traditionally understood written English. A variety diamesic, certainly (an ‘Italian broadcast written use, “as defined); but it can also be considered diaphasic or diastratic, depending on how large (up) the repertoire of those who use it. For the educated is just a stylistic choice, one of the many possible registers: the evolution of that ” average use Italian »described by Francesco Sabatini (e-Lister as immediate use Italian). But for those who only write on these occasions it could end up being the only way of writing: the only choice, ghetto and socially deficient. The e-Lister, in this case, as Italian neopopolare: technological change that Italian popular used for centuries by those who, knowing barely hold the pen in hand, had to grapple with writing. “

Reading the different contributions of the above work, there is a certain discouragement before what many linguists, provocatively, define an involution of the tongue. Her as she poses against this new challenge (if you can call “new” one of the inexhaustible changes the language …)?
“If you look at the post of Twitter but also to the status of Facebook, WhatsApp messages and even to the ‘old’ SMS – you’ll immediately notice that the texts entered are very different from traditional texts. Only that the difference does not lie in their supposed orality (missing almost completely – in these texts – the typical syntactic brands of Italian spoken). Nor graphics solutions for effect (the various XKE, c6, tvb and the like), respondents largely ancient mechanisms and start now to a rapid decline (today, for young people, abbreviations are something “uncool” and who uses them is a “bimbominkia”).
the real novelty of e-Lister is another: it is the fragmented nature of texts each day – almost without interruption – we write and read. Texts not only short, but incomplete; texts to fully express their sense almost always need an external element. As in the dialogues, in which every line leans to the interlocutor. As in the post of social networks, in which the link multimedia and images no longer represents an expansion, but a necessary condition. No hypertext, then, but hypotexts. This explains why they can write – and obviously read – even the many Italians who do not ever touch books or newspapers, even many that when they read a newspaper article are not able to understand what he says. “

writing, increasingly rapid and immediate request from social networks rewards growing informality, and the forms of courtesy are rather lame or even ostentatious. According to her, the Italian will go towards the emptying of meaning in the form of courtesy?
“In one of his last public speeches – one held at the Communication Festival in September last year – is Umberto Eco lined up openly against the abuse of you, “the problem of generalized you did not have to deal with grammar but with the generation loss of any historical memory and the two problems are closely linked.”
the dictatorship of you, in Indeed, now it concerns the relationships between people who hardly know, between work colleagues, with customers, with the recipients of advertising messages, with voters. He has brought with it a marked lowering of the average linguistic register of all Italians. As Cesare Segre noted in a 2010 article, “young people are the ones who seem to ignore most of the logs, and by that you put in an inferior condition, because they show that you have not found, in the speech, that the choice of language denotes their ability to position themselves in relation to his fellows. “
Meanwhile the phone, now perceived as a kind of prosthesis, has brought with it the indefinite widening of the private sphere (something their own business at any time, in any situation, in front of everyone), with a consequent lowering of the sense of language modesty. Added to this is the ease with which you can pick up, record and disseminate communication situations that until recently would run out in the private sphere (the You tube syndrome). The era of technological reproducibility with a vengeance, the border – also from a linguistic – between private and public has become increasingly blurred, allowing a continuous encroachment of the first ball in the second.
All this, for better or for worse, is ending with reverse the situation that has always characterized the history of our language: still “at the beginning of the twentieth century the Italian proved a substantial deficit for informal language use; beginning of the new millennium, the Italian used tend deficit for formal purposes “(as Michele Cortelazzo wrote in 2002).”

Summer or fall, will continue its drift hashtag on social networks . It would seem an extremely rarefied and basic language; Yet, they depopulated funny hashtags that give much room for creativity. An attempt to avoid being harnessed and reconfirm the freedom of speech (and fantasy)?
“As for the infamous quotes mimed with his fingers, even the hashtag has become a gesture: the forefinger and middle finger two-handed cross together a couple of times to make that intersection of lines long in musical language represents the sharps. In fact, it is since it launched (on Twitter, in 2007) that the hashtag was a gesture: semiotic gesture, if not physical, since it indicates, points out, offers – sometimes impose – an issue to the attention of a community.
many hashtags that in recent years have become a kind of slogan or catchphrase: creative formulas, often ironic, filming in various contexts. How #sapevatelo, as an invention of the comedian Corrado Guzzanti or #mainagioia, later became the title of a book by the blogger Stefano Guerrera. Other hashtags have marked dramatic moments in our recent history: like that #JeSuisCharlie that after the terrorist attacks in Paris on 7 January 2015, has become worldwide one of the most used of all time.
About imagination and ideas, for the jury of Macchianera Italian Awards for the best hashtag last year was #DaUnIdeaDiStefanoAccorsi, tied to the television series 1992 (born precisely as you pointed out emphatically in the opening credits, by the Bolognese actor’s idea). So here ‘wheels #daunideadistefanoaccorsi “; “Grated pecorino #daunideadistefanoaccorsi», «#daunideadistefanoaccorsi hot water”
From an idea of Monica Grandfather is instead the hashtag I care the most: that of #giornataproGrammatica that Rai Radio Tre organizes together with the Ministry of University and Research, the Association for the History of Italian Language and the Academy of Bran. In each of the three editions have been produced to date, the hashtag has arrived – at least for a few hours – ranks among the so-called Italian trending topics. A beautiful confirmation of the need for grammar shown by the Italians in recent decades: the widespread curiosity, but also “loyalty” (as she was called Luca Serianni) to its own language, seen as a key reference identity. “

Back to work for many means compete with a specialized vocabulary, which often hybridizes with English, through loans and casts. In particular, Milan seems more and live more closely this mixture and partial overlap. In his opinion it will create a kind of “pidgin-English-speaking technology” in the coming years?
“Along with writing rematch and informality triumph, the other element that characterizes the Italian of the millennium is the ‘glocalization’ vocabulary. The Italian, in fact, suffers today from a double boost. On the one hand that of the local dialects, which – in an ever more marked by communication informality – they return to find space, alternating and mixing the national language. The other, the pressure of english; or rather of its globalized version: the ubiquitous Globish, which now permeates the lexicon of all Western languages and beyond.
At this time, according to the available data, the glocalization from us hangs much more to the place that towards global. Nearly a third of the Italian states to express themselves in Italian and in dialect when speaking with family and friends. And in the latest editions of the great Italian dictionaries have received many words of origin such as the Sicilian dialect pizzino ‘note written by a mafia’, the northern ciulare ‘sex’ or figuratively “steal” the Roman Sbrocca ‘lose your head’, the Milan schiscetta ‘container for food’.
the overall proportion of English words, however, he continues to remain around 2%. According to Zingarelli 2016 data, of English origin words (including adaptations like steak from beefsteak and casts like skyscraper to skyscraper) constitute around 2.6% of lemmario. Taking into account only the integrals Anglicisms, the only immediately recognizable as foreign words (words like computers, hippie or zooming), the percentage drops to 1.9%. We are very far away, in short, from quell’ibridazione Italian-British that for over half a century is feared as an imminent threat. “

In September, many students will question what the university deal . Assuming that we know she is obviously and rightly so biased, why study linguistics today, in a reality that always gives less space to the humanistic world?
“Already: why study, today, a humanistic subject? The temptation is always to respond citing the story with which the writer David Foster Wallace opened his speech to graduates of an American college. “There are two fish swimming, and at some point encounter an older fish that goes in the opposite direction, makes a nod and says, ‘Hi, guys. How is the water? Ì. The two young fish swim some more ‘, then one looks at the other and says,’ What the hell is water? ‘. “
Exactly: what the hell is water? It is something in which we are immersed so much to not even realize it’s there. Something that we realize just by looking critically their behavior and that of those around us. The story says Foster Wallace, “about the true value of culture, where grades and qualifications have nothing to do, got to do just the pure and simple awareness: awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in beautiful view under the eyes of all to force us to remember to keep ourselves: ‘this is water, this is water’. “
the Italian is the language in which we live every day, every moment. To the point that we do not notice it. To the point that we take for granted. And this means that often we use it without any awareness. Without exploiting the wealth, the nuances, the different tones and potential. But the Italian is also the language in which we grew up, from which we have been raised: it is our mother tongue. The language that nourishes us from childhood, educates our thoughts and our feelings, shapes our worldview. All we owe a lot and it deserves all our gratitude: our attention, our study, our care. This is the language. The language is us. “