Ciao, hello, no! Italy's right-wing government wants to ban English words with €100,000 fines

The right-wing party led by Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, has pushed forward proposed new  legislation which will punish the use of English and other foreign words in official communications with fines between €5,000 and €100,000.

The goal of the legislation, which has received wide condemnation in the country even by Italy’s most renowned scholars of Italian linguistics and philology, the prestigious Accademia della Crusca, is “to defend and promote the Italian language” and protect the national identity, according to Meloni’s party.

The new proposal, supported by Meloni, was introduced by Fabio Rampelli, a member of Italy’s lower chamber of deputies. In a tweet pinned to his Twitter profile, the MP gives an example of the so-called “Anglomania” which will get Italian politicians and bureaucrats fined if the law is passed.

“In the lower chamber of deputies we speak Italian,” Rampelli writes. “We continue our battle for the use of our language instead of English. We can’t understand why we call ‘dispenser’ the automatic hand sanitizer dispenser.”

Instead of using the word “dispenser” in English, Meloni’s government would have officials use the much more wordy Italian expression: “dispensatore di liquido igienizzante per le mani.”

The Italian language – like most other languages in Europe – has adopted many English terms in recent years, in part because these were terms indicating ‘new’ things which did not belong to the Italian tradition (computer, social media, smart working), in part because the English language often offers a more concise, snappier version of terms that in Italian would take quite a roundabout way to express.

In part, because for many the use of an English word even where an Italian term would do