The Language of Power: Casini and Bancheri's In-Depth Analysis of Italian in Immigration and Global Contexts

Abstract

This review article looks at a groundbreaking book in sociolinguistics by Simone Casini and Salvatore Bancheri, What Is the Language of Power? Theoretical Reflections on Italian, Italiese and Other Languages, which focuses on the forms and uses of Italian in immigrant communities, as well as the role of the Italian language in the global village in which we now reside. Based on research conducted on the kind of Italian that takes shape in immigrant communities, called “Italiese,” one of the main insights that can be gleaned from this penetrating book is that the language that emerges in immigrant communities is a product of creative mechanisms, enlisted unconsciously to render the native language (or dialect) adapted to solving everyday communicative problems that pertain to the new environment socially and conceptually. By making the English input conform to the native language, structurally and semantically, the result is a code that allows for direct access to the new reality on its own terms. The book also relates the ways in which Italiese is constructed and employed to the history of Italian itself, ending with a broad examination of the roles that the language should be playing in an international context today. As such, it provides an expansive theoretical framework for assessing the factors that contribute to making a language, such as Italian, an instrument of control over any environment, real or virtual—hence, a “language of power.”