The influence of English slang on Italian

This paper intends to investigate both the influence of English slang on Italian current usage and some innovative aspects introduced by the Italian variety. The assumption from which the paper starts is that the contact between the two lexical varieties is not accidental, in that the semantics, the morphology, and even the phonology of English slang have massively affected Italian slang vocabulary, and inspired the creation of neologisms by analogy with pre-existent patterns. In the past, Giacomelli (1988) suggested that, although the contact between English and Italian slang is undeniable in the case of direct borrowings (flash, freak, pusher) and of some intensifiers (duro, peso, tosto [hard]), the relationship between these two varieties is often accidental. For instance, he claims that the connection between the Italian drug slang words buco, erba, fumo, nero, sniffare and their English counterparts (hole, grass, smoke, black, to sniff) is weak, vague, unnecessary, or even unreal (Giacomelli 1988: 44, 197). The position I take in this paper is different. On the one hand, I claim that some similarities between English and Italian slang terms could have arisen by coincidence and/or independent figurative developments. For instance, English grass (or herb) and Italian erba could have been independently associated with the idea of ‘marijuana’, because of the consistency and colour of the drug. On the other hand, the possibility of influence is strengthened by the existence of definite calques from English in this field. For instance, the Italian term cavallo acquired the sense ‘opium’ when Trainspotting was translated in Italian: Quasi tutti i tossici che conosco in Inghilterra se lo fumano il cavallo, invece di bucarsi. (Welsh 1993, trans. Zeuli 1996: 250 cited in Ambrogio and Casalegno 2004: 82) ‘Maist English junkies ah know smoke horse rather than shoot it up.’. Hence, I am not basically disagreeing with Giacomelli (1988), but claiming that Italian has evolved since 1988, and the interlinguistic contact with English is at present favoured by many factors, including the Internet, which helps long distance communication.