This talk is an examination of the attitudes to foreign words in Italy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its starting point is the 2014 documentary Me ne frego! Il fascismo e la lingua italiana, which shows how between 1929 and 1943 linguists and journalists close to the Fascist government participated in various campaigns for what was then called l'autarchia della lingua (the language autarchy).

Dr Cicioni will then look at a number of 21st-century publications which express concern that contemporary Italian may be "flooded" and "swamped" by foreign words, most of which "unnecessary" and "snobbish". Her analysis is based on theories of lexical borrowing and on attempts to assess the actual use and comprehension of words from other languages by Italian speakers.

Dr Mirna Cicioni