Speakers’ Perceptions Towards Invisible Anglicisms in Italian

This study contributes to the ongoing research on anglicisms, particularly focussing on
their ‘invisibility’ in the recipient language, and presents the results of a survey investigating speakers’
perceptions about the use of English loan translations and semantic loans in Italian. Using age as a
variable, the informants of the survey were divided into three age groups, – Millennials (30-44),
Generation X (45-60) and Boomers (over 60) – in order to establish which indirect borrowings of the
sample were considered acceptable or not, whether their ‘Englishness’ was detected, and which choice
they would make between an Italian word and an indirect borrowing. The tested items were chosen
among words and patterns recognized as English indirect borrowings in the literature, including lexical,
morphosyntactic and phraseological patterns. The results of the survey show the acceptance of items
such as, for example, evidenze (evidence), the use of coordinated prepositions da e per (to and from),
the multiple interrogative chi è chi e chi fa cosa (who’s who and who does what), irrespective of age.
In addition, the verb applicare (modelled on English to apply), frequently used in administrative
discourse, is widely perceived as alien to standard Italian. However, the data also confirm that younger
speakers are more open to the use of loan translations and semantic loans than older speakers, and are
less aware of the influence of English, supporting the trend towards the gradual assimilation of indirect
borrowings.