Why we need to save the Italian language

HOW TO SAVE ITALIAN

This incredible setback was also denounced by 600 professors: "In theses, there are errors worthy of third-grade students. We need to start again from the fundamentals: grammar, spelling, reading comprehension." This destruction of Italian extends across both the spoken and written language.

ALSO READ: The mayor who sends everyone to school to learn Italian. But why have we become illiterate again?

BARBARISATION OF THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE

In our daily lives, we increasingly speak with a limited vocabulary, made up of just a few words; we continually repeat, almost obsessively, like so many advertising slogans, the same words and concepts; we abuse metaphors (even very banal and with little meaning) and Anglo-Saxon words, a sign of a inferiority complex, even linguisticWe have made the swear word, even the most vulgar, an ordinary means of communication. Frequent, habitual, daily.

IMPOVERISHMENT OF THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE

Censis, with the usual accuracy of its analyses, spoke explicitly of «barbarization of the Italian language», of a «continuous simplification", from "a foul language that floods our collective life"The decline of a language, understood as the lexicon and identity of a people, and therefore the shared heritage of a country's community, marches on, accelerating in the habit of solipsistic profanity, parallel to the decline of a society. And to its inability to produce and reproduce ruling classes worthy of the name in terms of education, competence, responsibility, and core values. Censis thus adds: the embarrassment (using a word from the great Carlo Emilio Gadda) from the collective lexicon to a long list of points of collapse of the community dimension that, for years now, we have been accumulating within the perimeter of the Italian case. And in line with the therapy indicated for other sectors, we think of polyarchy as a compass of governance political and administrative, offers us a multiplication of lexicons, with the relative polysemy, to escape from theembarrassment.

On the other hand, even Giovanni Spadolini, who understood the national language quite well, spoke of Italy as a country of dialects and idioms, all of which are distinctive. But if we recognize the centrality of language in "making the nation," we cannot help but add to the polysemy, the goal of relaunch the value of common language, and therefore its quality, wherever it "becomes a nation", starting from the vital junctures of the country system. Schools, universities, representation policy and economic, sources that shape and fuel public opinion. The same places, if you look closely, where it first hatched and then exploded, in a form of mass contamination, the embarrassment.

WORDS TO SAVE

In this regard, the publishing house Zanichelli has launched the project #wordstosave, an initiative to safeguard words that are increasingly less present in written and spoken use and in the media. The goal is avoid the impoverishment of Italian Promoting the use of words that are sometimes overlooked in favor of more common and intuitive synonyms, which are more generic and less expressive. To achieve this, Zanichelli is bringing a large dictionary to various Italian squares, inviting passersby to choose a word to protect and use it appropriately. The large dictionary installation, on the back cover, features a touchscreen monitor that will rotate five of 3.126 endangered lemmas. Once the passerby has chosen a word to save, they can post it on their social media, along with its meaning. Alternatively, they can opt for the analog route, sending postcards containing the word they want to save.

HOW TO SAVE THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE

In general, to save Italian, to restore dignity and value to the language as a driving force of the entire national identity, we should start with our own microcosms. School, work, family: and go back to speaking like civilized people, perhaps giving up the litany of useless and vulgar swear words. It would happen right away, if many of us did it, a contamination effect, and we would end up like this to waste a fortune which belongs to the whole country.   

UMBERTO ECO AND THE RULES FOR SPEAKING ITALIAN WELL

• Avoid alliteration, ellipses, and idioms.
• Do not use commercial acronyms and abbreviations.
• Remember that parentheses, even when they seem essential, still interrupt the conversation.
• Don't overuse foreign words, which are not at all polite.
• Never generalize.
• Few quotes and very few comparisons.
• Rhetorical questions are almost always useless.

Swear words on television

THE SCHOOLS WE LIKE:

• In Piacenza, there's a school that screens children's cell phones to encourage them to "talk to each other again."
• The elementary school in Nogara (Verona) where children create lamps and lights by recycling waste (photo)
• Silence taught in schools with the Montessori method. To discover the pleasure of rest, but above all to learn to reflect.