Non-Adapted Anglicisms in Italian: Attitudes, Frequency Counts, and Lexicographic Implications

The great deal of research on Anglicisms has witnessed different degrees of openness to borrowings from English. Among the languages affected by the presence of Anglicisms, Italian appears to be one of the most receptive, thus giving rise to different reactions and originating a lively debate among academics. The opinions of a number of linguists from the 1980s onwards are presented in the first part of this article. The attitudes of academics towards Anglicisms shows certain trends in interpreting the phenomenon in relation to the present stage of the language. Subsequently, in order to verify whether these attitudes are justifiable on the basis of numerical data, the incidence of non-adapted Anglicisms in Italian in both vocabulary and usage has been measured by means of lexicographic evidence and corpus-based findings. The final part of this article describes the implications of corpus-based frequency counts for lexicographic practice. In particular, general-purpose Italian monolingual dictionaries and dictionaries of Anglicisms are considered.