Tra slogan e norme: gli anglicismi nella lingua italiana del diritto e della comunicazione istituzionale

Abstract

Forestierisms, especially anglicisms, increasingly pervade the language of public administration, institutional communication and, to a lesser extent, the language of law, thus undermining the traditional conservative nature of legal language.
The survey carried out on the most recent legislation shows that their entry into legislative texts is closely linked to the progressive pervasiveness of other legal systems, starting with that of the European Union, and to the influence of other sectoral languages, in particular scientific, economical, financial and technological languages.
Furthermore, even if they are not present in the laws, they tend to emerge in the implementing measures adopted by the public administrations and they are often used in political-institutional communication to synthesize, like slogans, the content of the measure.
The overall feeling is that the use of the forestierism is often linked to reasons that have little to do with the need for precision and rigour and that it depends rather on haste, fear of “false friends”, lack of inventiveness to find valid substitutes in Italian.
In all these cases, it would be advisable to avoid forestierism who have not entered the common lexicon, to the advantage of clarity and comprehensibility of laws even for those who do not know foreign languages, valuing the lexical richness and expressive potential of the Italian language, in the name of that principle of communicative loyalty that should inspire the relationship between public authorities and citizens.