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Final Essay PDF
Final Essay PDF
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1 Introductin
Since the worldwide spread of Anglo-American culture in the 20th and 21st centuries,
many English words have entered popular usage in other languages. These words are called
Anglicisms and they can be divided into two categories: direct borrowings and indirect
borrowings.
Direct borrowings can be divided into loanwords, false and hybrid. In this study we will
focus on loanwords. They can be classified into Non-adapted and adapted. Non adapted
loanwords are “ a word or multi-word unit borrowed without or with minor formal and
semantic integration”(Molino, moodle material 2021) while adapted loanwords are “a word or
multi-word unit borrowed with ortographic, phonological and/or morphological
integration”.(Molino, moodle material 2021)
On the other hand, Indirect borrowings are divided into Calque and Semantic loan. Our
attention will be on the previous one. Calque can be further divided into: Loan translation, “a
word or multi-word unit which translates an English item into the RL”(Molino, moodle
material 2021) and Loan rendition is “a word or multi-word unit which translates part of a SL
item and provides a loose equivalent for the other item in the RL” (Molino, moodle material,
2021) finally a Loan creation is “a word or multi-word unit in the RL which freely renders the
SL model using items of the RL”. (Molino, moodle material 2021)
Another important distinction should be made between Necessary loans and Luxury loans.
A Necessary loan is an Anglicisms that introduces a new object or concept – cultural,
scientific, technical knowledge- in the Recipient language(RL). A luxury loan is used to refer
to an object or a concept already present in the RL to express it in a more fashionable way.
Anglicisms can be found also in audiovisual products originnally produced in English and
than translated to italian through dubbing. Since the 21st century the Anglo-American
audiovisual products dubbed into italian started to increase and to be part of the italian
television probgrammes and to be shown in cinemas. The language of dubbing is called
dubbese. “Dabbese has been found to have specific linguistic traits which distinguish it from
both the source and the target language and to constitute a third norm” (Pavesi, 1996, p.128)
To achive my goal I started watching the episodes, the fist one lasted 44
minutes while the last one lasted 42 minutes. While watching the series I took
note of the Anglicisms I found. I retrived a total of 89 english loans, some of
which were repeated several times. I decided to Analyse only the most
interesting, 12 for the first episode and 7 for the second.
To analyse the Anglicisms I used some useful tools: The Italian dictionaries
Lo Zingarelli 2020(Nicola Zingarelli, 1917,
https://www.ubidictionary.com/it/home) , and Il Ragazzini 2020(Giuseppe
Ragazzini, 1967, https://www.ubidictionary.com/it/home) , The Italian Web
2016 corpus(itTenTen16, https://www.sketchengine.eu/) and finally the english
dictionary, The Oxford English Dictionary(also called OED, James Murray,
1884, https://www.oed.com/) . The two italian dictionaries were used to verify
the presence of the recorded Anglicisms in the italian language and to find a
possible translation. We also divided the words into luxury loans and necessary
loans.
3 Gilmore Girls
Gilmore Girls is an American comedy-drama television series created by Amy
Sherman Pallandino. It first aired in 2000 and it ended in 2007, with a total of 153 episodes.
The series tells the story of Lorelai Gilmore and her dauther Lorelai Gilmore, better known as
“Rory”, and their mother-dauther relationship based on friendship and complicity. The two
main charachters are not only mother and dather but they are best firends also due to the fact
that Lorelai had Rory when she was only 17. They live in a small town called Stars Hollow
and they are much-needed members of the community. They know evrybody there and
during the episodes we see the main characters form bonds of love and friendship.
This section examins the presence of Anglicisms in the dubbed dialogues of the fist
episode of the first season, 44 minutes of vision. I found a total of 32 english loans but some
of them were repeated many times. These terms are all direct non-adapted Anglicisms. For
example ok was repeated 13 times during the vision.
In episode 22 of the 7th season, the last of the tv series, I observed 57 Anglicisms ( Also
here some of the english loans were repeated. For example the interjection “wow” is repeated
4 times). In the episode we can see several repetitions of the term “hamburger” and of the
term “Hot dog” because the characters are organising a party and so they used the lemmas
many times in their dialogues. This information allows us to understand that the words we can
find depend on the topic of each episode. A further confirmation comes from Minutella’s
study where she says “The degree of Anglicisation in Italian dubbed language in genre-
related and depends on the type of audience, the plot, the setting of the story and the
characters”.( Minutella, 2015 p.101)
Afetr taking notes of the Anglicsms I reparted them into the field of usage of The Grande
Dizionario Italiano dell’uso( De Mauro, 2nd ed. 2007, henceforth GDU). As the scholar
Virginia pulcini tells us in her analysis (Anglicisms in Italian:moving on into the third
millenium):
“The Grande dizionario italiano dell’uso is one of the most authoritative and comprehensive
dictionaries of italian. Its characteristics feature is the rich variety of usage labels, which helps users to
distinguish between lemmas that are common(CO= comune), high frequency(AU=alto uso) or low
frequency(BU=basso uso) and so on. Lemmas of foreign origin are marked as
ES(esotismo=exoticism). The label TS indicates technical and specialist terminology and is
accompanied by a specific field label.”
Besides the label ‘TS’ for Technical and specialist terminology we can find other labels in
the GDU as Pulcini explains
“The GDU adopts a wide range of field labels as this dictionary records many ters belonging to
specialised areas of vocabulary. For this reason we grouped these labels(translated into English)
according to the three disciplinary domains used by European Research Council to cover the wide
spectrum of knowledge, i.e., SH(Social Sciences and Humanities), LS (Life Science) and PE(Physical
Sciences and Engineering)”
We have this distribution due to the choice of the Anglicisms: SH 68,43%, LS 26,31%, PS 5,26%
Disciplinary domain
LS (Life Sciences)
Figure 1
4. Conclusion
The goal of this studio was to demonstrate the increasing number of Anglicisms in dubbed
italian through the years. In order to reach my purpose I analysed two episodes of the same
american tv series, “Gilmore Girls”, that are seven years apart. Although the years between
the two are not many I could however verify my thesis.
During the 44 minutes vision of the first episode I could find 32 english loans of which
only 15 were different. On the other hand throughout the 42 minutes of episode 22 I detected
57 Anglicisms of which 31 were different. Despite the short timefreme between the two we
can observe that the number of Anglicismi has doubled. There is a reason that explains why
english loans has increased in dubbed dialogues “The reason for such phenomenon can be
ascribed to the overt and covert prestige of the English language and Anglo-American culture
as well as to marketing and commercial factors linked to globalisation”.
References
English in Italy: Linguistic, Educational and professional challenges( p.87- 102).
Italy”.
Minutella, V.(2017). “Anglicisms in italian: Moving on into the third millennium”. In
challenges.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilmore
Webliography
Lo Zingarelli 2020. https://www.ubidictionary.com/it/home, last access February 6, 2022.
Appendix
Glossary
In yellow the Anglisisms I chose from the first episode and in green those of the last episode.