The Dante Alighieri Society of Michigan, in collaboration with the Consulate of Italy in Detroit and with the support of the Italian American Club of Livonia Charitable Foundation, has scheduled three interesting events to celebrate Italian Language Week.

“L’italiano dei giovani degli anni 2020 [duemila venti o venti venti?] tra standard, neostandard, nuovi anglicismi e ‘risorgenze’ dialettali” (“The Italian of the youth in the 2020s between standard, new standard, new anglicisms, and the resurgence of dialects”)

The first event will take place on October 16 from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM EST and features Paolo D’Achille of Accademia della Crusca, from Rome, Italy. In his presentation Prof. D’Achille will provide a quick historical overview of the Italian language spoken by young people focusing also on the definition of “young”. He will frame the language spoken by young Italians as a variant of contemporary Italian. Prof. D’Achille will also show concrete (mostly lexical) examples of the language used by young Italians, in reference to a book published by the Accademia della Crusca on this issue. This event will be an online webinar.

“La rappresentazione letteraria dell’interazione in classe in un corpus di romanzi dagli inizi del Novecento a oggi” (“The literary representation of interaction in the classroom in a body of novels from the early twentieth century to today")

The second event on October 20 from 10:30 to 12:30 will take place at Wayne State University Lab 368 in Manoogian Hall, in Detroit, Michigan. The presenter will be Natasha Tenan, a graduate student of Roma Tre. In her talk she will present her research on how youth language is represented in contemporary Italian authors. In her research she highlights trends and changes in the Italian language among the youth and how it affects their interactions in the classroom. Since the end of the XIX century there has been a wide production of novels set in the classroom. Natasha will show how authors perceive the Italian language used by the younger generation in their novels. This presentation will be given in Italian.

“Che cosa ci insegna l’italiano dei giovani? Sulle varietà giovanili nella didattica delle lingue e dell’italiano” (What does the language of the young teach us?  On youthful variations in language and Italian teaching ")

The third event will be an online webinar presented by Professors Elisabetta Bonvino and Elisa De Roberto from Rome, Italy. Professors Bonvino and De Roberto will discuss how much “space” the language used by the youth should be given in the world language classroom. In particular they will concentrate on the teaching of Italian and illustrate how the language of the youth shares a complex network of relationships with the colloquial language, dialects, and slang, but also with the language of mass media. In their presentation, the two scholars will illustrate how the Italian spoken by the youth is not only a language variant the young people use to interact among themselves, but it is also an important sociolinguistic phenomenon in contemporary Italian. 

To register for these free events, please visit the Dante Alighieri website.