The influence of English and French on the Italian language of fashion: Focus on false Anglicisms and false Gallicisms

Fashion language is a multilingual specialised language, shared and enriched by a wide number of users and including a variety of areas, each one consisting of different semantic fields. It has a complex inner stratification, ranging from the more specialised language regarding textiles and materials to the less specialised language of fashion media. While the language of textiles and materials is highly technical, denotative and monosemous, fashion media use a very creative and diversified language by mixing more specific fashion-related items with general language and foreign borrowings. This contribution attempts to describe the consistent linguistic interference from English and French into the Italian lexicon of fashion. The analysis focuses on borrowings and false borrowings as used in one of the major fashion magazines published in Italy, i.e. ELLE. Corpus data were drawn from twelve issues of the Italian edition of the magazine, collected over a period of three years. Examples of Anglicisms and Gallicisms – both genuine and false ones – were identified, collected and analysed. The findings show the creative potential of both genuine and false Anglicisms and Gallicisms in the Italian language when used to describe fashion.