New words and new forms of linguistic purism in the 21st century: the Italian debate

Unlike communities of speakers of other Romance languages such as French and Spanish, it has often been noticed that many Italian speakers are not particularly concerned by the inflow of foreign (mainly English) words. One reason for this, according to some scholars, is that standard Italian does not stir up linguistic identity for many native users, while English enjoys great prestige as the international language. In this paper, positions on neologisms of foreign origin are illustrated, using recently updated monolingual Italian dictionaries and also comments on neologisms collected from blogs and websites. Although they have a different status and degree of representativeness, the latter respond faster than dictionaries to doubts concerning the use of loans in Italian texts