Multiculturalism in Italian brand names: a case study of sport products

Abstract

While it is true that Italian brand names traditionally included Italian as the prevalent language, nowadays we find other languages in the formation of Italian commercial names. As for the use of foreign linguistic material, the increasing spread of English in commercial names is due to the process of globalization. In fact, in addition to English, other languages are employed in hybrid irregular neologisms, in which words or morphemes belonging to different languages are connected. Our linguistic analysis will enable us to trace the boundaries of the multicultural dimension of the Italian brands of companies that make mountaineering products, collected in a database of 2000 items.