The lexical influence of Italian on Turkish

Italian and other Romance languages of Italy have been in contact with Turkish for more than seven centuries. Not surprisingly, in the cross-cultural context produced by this prolonged contact, language interference has had remarkable consequences on the vocabularies of both Italy and Turkey, even though clearly in favour of Italian (Tuscan, Florentine), Venetian and Genoese as donor languages. In this contribution the research about Italanisms in Turkish is resumed and updated as far as the state of the art is concerned. Obviously, due to lack of space, the illustration of Italian loanwords in Turkish is necessarily limited to a very few exemplary cases. Topics touched upon are the recipient language, the historical background and the donor languages, previous studies and sources, problematic isssues, reconstructed words, and Italian Levantines, their identity and language,