Anglicismi nell’italiano normativo elvetico: estensione e natura del fenomeno

Abstract

Over the last few decades, Italian has increasingly borrowed from English to create a wide range of neologisms. This holds true especially with regard to languages for specific purposes, including legal and institutional language. The use of foreign words by Swiss public authorities has raised political concern in recent years, and action has been taken to contain the spread of this trend. Although some papers have already tackled this question, none of them adopt an empirical perspective. This corpus-based study sets out to investigate the use of anglicisms in Swiss legal Italian from the 70s to the present day. A twofold quantitative and qualitative analysis will shed light on the extent and microdiachronic evolution of this phenomenon and attempt a description of its features. The results are encouraging; even though the number of anglicisms has increased over the last few decades, Swiss federal legislation makes scarce use of foreign words. All in all, anglicisms do not seem to constitute a major barrier to an accessible legislation, at least in Switzerland.