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La più bella del mondo – The most beautiful in the world #6

10 talks on the Italian language

“The most beautiful in the world” is supposed to be a supermodel and yet in Italy the expression is more often than not used to define Italian language. Is Italian truly the most beautiful language in the world? It is commonplace, due to either italophilia or nationalism, but is it only this?

A series led by Dr Stefano Jossa, author of La più bella del mondo. Perché amare la lingua italiana(Einaudi) and Reader in Italian at Royal Holloway University of London, will explore the relationships between Italian and other languages, the Italian words that have become key to interpret our contemporary world, the various languages of arts, music, technology, economy and politics.

Event in Italian with simultaneous translation in English

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La più bella del mondo – The most beautiful in the world #6

The language of insults

Dr Stefano Jossa and Prof Massimo Arcangeli in conversation.

Since Beppe Grillo famously launched the so called Vaffa day, with an iconic combination of an insult in Italian and an English word, insults have rapidly spread in the everyday Italian of politics and news. But where do they come from? Why is Italian so renowned for its insults? Are insults just parolacce (bad words) or do they bare additional meanings? Stefano Jossa and Massimo Arcangeli will discuss the relevance and significance of insults in the Italian language from many different angles – historical, political and cultural, in order to assess whether Italian is the most beautiful language in the world in its insulting system too.

Massimo Arcangeli (Rome, 1960) is Professor of Linguistic at the University of Cagliari, and author of several essays and papers. 
He is member of the Doctoral College in Historical Linguistics and Italian Linguistic History at the Sapienza University of Rome. He collaborates with the broadcaster SAT 2000, with a language section, and with publications and newspapers (“La Stampa”, “Il Manifesto”, “L’Unità”, “Liberazione”, “L’Unione Sarda”). He also hosts an Italian language and culture show for RAI International. He coordinated the PLIDA project for the Dante Alighieri society and he is the creator and director of “Parole in cammino. Festival of Italian and languages ​​of Italy”. He directs the magazines “LId’o. Italian language of today” (Bulzoni) and “Bulletin of the lexical atlas of the ancient Italian vulgar” (Fabrizio Serra).

  • Organizzato da: Italian Cultural Institute