Introduction

The prominence of English as the world's most widely disseminated foreign language (FL) and second language (L2), as well as its status as the predominant lingua franca (LF), is well established. The global proliferation of English results from centuries of colonization, which has influenced not only former British territories but also nations that have never experienced British colonial rule. These latter countries constitute what is termed the "expanding circle," encompassing states where English functions as a foreign language with gradually increasing usage. Throughout its history, Italy has positioned itself within this expanding circle, and this paper analyses this positioning in terms of social impact, intralinguistic effects, and phonetic influence. The first section provides a brief historical overview illuminating the presence of English in Italy: its point of entry, its role within Italian society, its impact on the Italian lexicon, and the underlying reasons for these phenomena. The second section analyzes empirical data to elucidate the principal phonetic and phonological differences between the two languages. Data were collected from Italian native speakers (INSs) who use English as a foreign language and possess above-average English proficiency. These data were analysed in comparison with Received Pronunciation (RP) standards. Additionally, excerpts from authentic conversational exchanges are presented to demonstrate how linguistic structures and word usage are affected. The ultimate aim of this study is to investigate whether the use of English as a foreign language in Italy constitutes merely a sporadic phenomenon or whether it merits consideration as the foundation for an emerging variety that could potentially develop into Italian Standard English.

Historical Background

The precise chronology of English penetration into the Italian peninsula remains somewhat unclear; however, it is possible to trace initial contact between the two languages to 1550, when William Thomas published Principal Rules of the Italian Grammer, with a Dictionarie for the Better Understandynge of Boccace, Petrarcha, and Dante, followed in 1598 by John Florio's The Italian English Dictionary (O'Connor 1972). These publications reveal the presence of English within Italian society nearly five centuries ago. Nevertheless, this presence has never been sufficiently rooted in Italian culture to develop into a distinct variety within the primary spoken language. Indeed, unlike countries such as India, Singapore, and other former colonies, Italy has never been subject to British imperial domination nor invaded by anglophone populations.

Crystal (2003) refers to this distinction through Braj Kachru's three concentric circles framework, in which each circle represents the manner of language acquisition and usage. The innermost circle, designated the "inner circle," encompasses countries where English serves as the primary language (e.g., the United States, United Kingdom, Australia). The intermediate circle, termed the "outer circle," comprises countries where English occupies an important role as a second language within multilingual contexts (e.g., India, Singapore, Malawi). Finally, the outermost circle, called the "expanding" or "extending" circle, includes nations where, in the absence of any history of colonization by inner circle members, the importance of English is recognized but the language possesses no official administrative status. Italy is positioned within this final category, as English is not embedded within society as a second language; however, its value as an international language is acknowledged, evidenced by its widespread instruction in schools from age six (Santipolo 2016).

The Rise of English in Italian Culture

In light of the foregoing discussion, the use of English in Italy lacks deep historical roots and has not been precipitated by specific historical events; rather, it has been gradually incorporated into the culture. English began gaining a foothold at the beginning of the twentieth century when emigration in pursuit of the American dream propelled significant portions of the Italian population across the Atlantic in search of prosperity. The substantive Americanization of Italian culture occurred following World War II, when the United States achieved political and economic dominance over Western European nations (Fink & Minganti 1987). From that period to the present, English has been absorbed into everyday Italian life, making it the most widespread foreign language in Italy (Pulcini 1994).

One prominent manifestation of this linguistic incorporation is evident in the borrowings introduced into the Italian language. As Beccaria (1988) observes, some of these borrowings appear superfluous, constituting mere replacements for words that possess Italian equivalents, such as freezer (congelatore), weekend (fine settimana), and full-time (tempo pieno). Figure 1 provides an example from authentic conversation in which an Italian native speaker employs the word tattoo within an otherwise Italian discourse, despite the existence of the Italian equivalent tatuaggio.

In addition to these arguably unnecessary borrowings, Italian has adopted items that appear to lack equivalents capable of fully conveying certain semantic nuances, such as baby-sitter (bambinaia), sketch (bozzetto), and record (primato). There also exist English words commonly used in Italian that lack precise equivalents: k.o. (fuori combattimento), pic-nic (merenda all'aria aperta), identikit (ricostruzione della fisionomia di una persona ricercata), and derby (sfida tra due squadre della stessa città) (Pulcini 1994).

False Anglicisms

Among the borrowings that Italian has acquired through the Americanization process, numerous words have undergone Italianization. These are lexical items that approximate the appearance and sound of English words but possess entirely different meanings from their ostensible English sources: beauty-case (wash bag), fotoreporter (photojournalist), autogoal (own goal), mister (coach), bomber (prolific football scorer), golf or golfino (jumper), flipper (pinball machine), autostop (hitchhiking), among others (Pulcini 1997). Pulcini (1997) explains that according to linguists and lexicographers, this appropriation of English words adapted for Italian usage stems not only from the cultural prestige they convey but also from their brevity, phonetic effects, compounding flexibility, and similarity to Italian words through Latin and French derivation.

The Italian Variety

As previously established, the Italian language has never historically been influenced by English or English-derived languages; consequently, no recognized standard variety exists. As Crystal (2003) explains, a variety of English is typically positioned along a continuum relative to Standard English, implying that it represents a new manifestation of English developed from a form of Standard English. These varieties exhibit numerous variations in grammar, structure, and pronunciation, arising because different forms of English have developed within multilingual contexts where the dominant local language has interfered with and influenced second language usage—in this case, English (Wardhaugh 1970).

A similar pattern can be traced in Italian native speakers' use of English, where the first language (L1) affects second language (L2) usage, particularly in pronunciation. Consequently, any Italian native speaker using English produces numerous variations that render the final speech divergent in multiple respects from the Standard English to which the speaker refers.

Pronunciation Differences

When discussing linguistic variation, the most salient differences typically relate to pronunciation. Pronunciation is intimately connected to phonetics, and in the specific case of English and Italian, it is crucial to note that these languages do not share identical phonetic inventories from the International Phonetic Alphabet, or at least not entirely. Considering Roach's classification (Roach cited in Deterding 2004) of principal English vowels, there are twelve such vowels—nearly twice the number employed in Italian—some of which sound remarkably similar due to their proximity in mode and place of articulation within the oral cavity. Italian employs seven primary vowels, of which only four correspond to those used in English (Paoli 2016), and only two pairs exhibit vague similarity to one another.

Mackay et al. (2001) explain that regarding consonants, both languages share the same consonantal inventory with three principal exceptions: the /θ/ sound does not exist in Italian, the /ð/ sound is similarly absent, and the /h/ sound is silent in Italian, contrasting with the aspirated English /h/. It should be noted that the same study makes an additional observation regarding the /r/ sound in both languages, whereby the English /r/ is less pronounced than its Italian counterpart and frequently manifests as the approximant /ɹ/ or becomes silent.

Data Analysis

To achieve a comprehensive understanding of how the Italian variety differs from Standard English and to contextualize vowel and consonantal differences, a corpus of recordings was collected and compared with RP phonetic production. For data collection, as documented in Appendices 1-6, six Italian participants were asked to read seven lines, which were subsequently transcribed and compared with RP pronunciation as indicated in the Cambridge Dictionary (2018). Each line was selected for containing at least one element with potential to elicit variation from Italian native speakers based on the previously discussed differences.

Examining the production of Line 1 by INS1, INS2, and INS3 reveals that the /h/ sound in nearly all pronounced words becomes silent, as it would be in Italian. Furthermore, in INS3's case, four out of four words are pronounced with a silent /r/, whereas in the other two cases, only some words exhibit this variation. It is noteworthy that in INS3's and INS5's production of Line 2, an /h/ sound appears unexpectedly between two vowels in "she (h)isn't"—this may plausibly represent an attempt to compensate for the lack of /h/ aspiration by inserting the sound between vowels.

Two additional variations appear consistently across all participants in Lines 3-6: the mispronunciation of the sounds /θ/ and /ð/, which, as indicated in Figure 2, are both dental fricatives, voiceless and voiced respectively. As previously mentioned, these sounds are absent from the Italian phonetic inventory; consequently, participants produced the closest Italian equivalents in terms of dental voiceless and voiced sounds: /t/ and /d/. Close examination of Line 5 reveals that only INS3, INS4, and INS5 replace the /θ/ sound in "think" with /t/, whereas in the other three cases, the initial dental sound is produced as expected but subsequent instances are replaced. This may reflect an initial moment of participant awareness regarding the expected pronunciation of /th/, potentially representing residual knowledge from traditional grammar-based English instruction received in school (Pulcini 1997). According to Menner's (2007) research on phonetic and phonological influences in non-native intonation, these variations can be understood as L1 influences transposed into L2 production; the cases of INS1, INS2, and INS6 may represent instances where L1 influence overwhelms pre-existing knowledge.

L1 influence, combined with the absence of certain sounds in Italian, can be considered triggering factors in Line 7, where all participants pronounced the /r/ sound in words where RP prescribes a silent /r/. This phenomenon also reflects a specific characteristic of Italian as a "rhotic language," in which the /r/ sound is strongly articulated in all positions.

The aforementioned absence of certain vowels in Italian that occur in English is revealed through variations in every participant's vowel pronunciation across all lines. With rare exceptions, such as INS1's pronunciation of "horse," all participants substituted the expected production with the closest or most similar sound from the Italian phonetic inventory. What proves particularly interesting is that in nearly all cases, participants employed identical vowels to replace given sounds; when this pattern does not hold, as in INS2's case, the reason may be attributable to the participant's regional origins and use of vowels in his or her specific Italian dialect.

Structural Variations

Crystal (2003), when discussing the emergence of different English varieties, describes how each variety during its formation has been influenced by the mother tongue of a given country and any other languages present in the region. He also references how these influences—and consequently, the usage patterns and structures of those languages—have modified English structures and language use. A similar process may be operative in Italian speakers' use of English. As this paper aims solely to provide a preliminary overview of Italian English for consideration as a potential standardized variety, further development of this topic will be reserved for future research.

An example of structural variation can be observed in Figures 3 and 4, where the preposition "to" is replaced with "in" and the preposition "for" with "from." In Italian, within these specific contexts, native speakers would use the literal translations of "in" and "from." Furthermore, in Figure 4, what should be "I have been living here for 2 years" is replaced with the present tense form for the same reason as the prepositional substitutions: in Italian, native speakers would say "I live here from X years" (Io vivo qui da X anni). An additional noteworthy substitution appears in Figure 5, where a common variation often attributed to insufficient knowledge occurs. Here, the word "people," which functions as a plural mass noun, is treated as singular—the Italian translation (la gente) is grammatically singular, thus the speaker uses "was" instead of "were." This represents a possible case of direct transposition from Italian grammatical structures.

Conclusion

 Although English does not currently fulfill any institutional or second-language role in Italy, the recognized prestige of the language and initiatives promoting its use throughout the country have increased substantially over the past century. Given the foregoing discussion and based on Crystal's (2003) assertions regarding English varieties, Italian English appears to constitute a developing set of variations in which English is penetrating Italian language use through borrowings and the Italianization of anglophone lexis. In light of this, those alterations erroneously considered errors resulting from inadequate education should perhaps be reconceptualized as variations originating from L1 influence. This process could ultimately lead to the recognition of Italian English as a standard variety accepted as such, thereby necessitating a revision of the concept of error.

References 

Cambridge University Press (2018) Cambridge Dictionary [Internet] Available from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english [Accessed 11th December 2018]

Crystal, D. (2003) English as a global language. 2 ed. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press

Deterding, D. (2004) How Many Vowel Sounds Are There in English?. STETS Language & Communication Review, 3 (1), pp 19-21

Fink, G., and Minganti, F. (1987) La vita privata italiana sul modello americano [The Italian private life on the american model]. In La vita privata [The private life]. Il Novecento. Edited by Philippe Ariès and George Duby. Bari, Laterza.

Mackay, I., R., A., MEador, D., Flege, J., E. (2001) The Identification of English Consonants by Native Speakers of Italian. Phonetica, 58, pp 103-125

O’Connor D., J. (1972) John Florio's Contribution to Italian-English Lexicography. Italica, 49 (1), pp 49-67

Paoli, S. (2016) A short guide to Italian Phonetics and Phonology for students of Italian Paper V. Oxford, Oxford University Press

Pulcini, V. (1994) The English language in Italy. English Today, 10 (4), pp 49-52

Pulcini, V. (1997) Attitudes towards the spread of English in Italy. World Englishes, 16 (1), pp 77-85

Santipolo, M. (2016) L’inglese nella scuola italiana [The English in the Italian school]. Venezia, Edizioni Ca’Foscari

Wardhaugh, R. (1970) The contrastive analysis hypothesis. TESOL Quarterly, 4 (2), pp 123-130