17 - Reflecting popularity of lingua

Professor Piero Trifone breaks down Italian language studies worldwide

Do you know that in Japan our language is so popular that it produced a real fad?" asks Piero Trifone, one of the most authoritative scholars of the Italian language, and Dean of Siena's Università per Stranieri. "Two of the music groups most loved by Japanese teenagers are Pizzicato Five and Cibo Matto, and their songs, inspired by the soundtracks of Italian movies of the Seventies, bear titles such as 'Bellissima 90,' 'Arrivo a Capri,' 'Nicola,' and 'Nata a marzo.' This is evidence that the success of Italian is global, and not limited to the countries where our emigrants settled."
Trifone is the author, with Maurizio Dardano, of the famous Grammatica italiana that is in widespread use even outside of Italy; with Luca Serianni he compiled the monumental, 2800-page Storia della lingua italiana (three volumes published by Einaudi), the most complete reconstruction of Italian linguistics ever.
In his capacity as Dean of the University for Foreigners, Trifone carries out an intense promotion of Italian language and culture abroad. He does this especially from the standpoint of professional qualification: he successfully organized linguistic training courses for teachers of Italian abroad that were attended by some 4,000 teachers across the continents, and every year has his University promote a refresher course in Teaching of Italian to Foreigners.
What is it about Italy that fascinates foreigners, besides its monuments, culture and dynamism of enterprise?
"The whole world looks at Italy as the country of vacations and - why not? - of love. Vacations, love and pizza - which is even more globalized than hamburgers - are reasons for foreigners to be attracted to our lifestyle and therefore our language. Two characters in a recent Danish film, Italian for Beginners, exchange these lines: 'Are you married?' 'No, but I attend an Italian language class.' What I mean is that Italian today demonstrates greater vitality than German and even French, which is a prestigious and useful language but is considered too elitist and therefore less able to raise passion, curiousity or simple fun."
The growing demand for Italian language is being met with a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand Italy strives to train teachers; on the other, it supports its own scholastic system abroad targeting students. Prof. Balboni, who runs the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Ca' Foscari, spoke of the former; could you explain us the latter?
"The institutional network of Italian scholastic activities abroad is managed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and it includes state schools, private schools, Italian sections within European Schools, Italian sections in international and foreign schools, Italian language and culture courses, and lecturers teaching in foreign universities."
Would you mind giving us some figures?
"I'll gladly quantify. Let's begin with state schools: there are 21, distributed in eight cities. Three in Asmara, three in Addis Ababa, three in Paris, three in Athens, three in Madrid, three in Barcelona, two in Istanbul, and one in Zurich. In 2001-2002 they were attended by a total of 3,650 students; Italy provided 240 members of their staff, most of them teachers. Private schools, most of which are legally recognized, number 161: 41 in Africa, 57 in America, 13 in Asia, and 50 in Europe. These schools trained some 11,000 students in the 2001-2002 school year. Locally recruited teachers, who form the bulk of the staff, were reinforced with 136 people sent from Italy."
Next come the European Schools. Could you tell us exactly what are they?
"These schools were formed to ensure education to the children of Community officials. Today they are intergovernmental scholastic institutions that educate European citizens in a cosmopolitan cultural environment. Their curricula include teaching the student's mother tongue as well as a second language. There are 35 Italian sections in 10 schools: four in Belgium (three in Brussels and one in Mol), two in Germany (one in München, the other in Karlsruhe), one in the United Kingdom (in Culham), one in Luxemburg, one in the Netherlands (in Bergen), and one in Italy (in Varese). There are also two recently founded schools in Germany (Frankfurt) and Spain (Alicante). In 2001-2002 these Italian sections were attended by 1,800 students and staffed by 110 teachers."
What about the Italian sections of international and foreign schools.
"We have 26 Italian sections in international schools, 22 of which in French lyceums; then there's one in Belgium, one in Germany, and two in the United States, in New York and Boston. As far as foreign schools are concerned, they include 45 Italian sections. Bilateral agreements are in effect with several Eastern and Central European countries allowing bilingual courses that can give access to Italian universities to be held. Overall, these Italian sections train some 12,500 students, supported by 98 Italian staffers."
The running total is in the whereabouts of 30,000 students. How many of these are not Italian?
"Most of them: approximately three quarters of the total. This gives you a measure of the charm that foreigners feel for the Italian language. At the same time this testifies of the high quality of education ensured by Italian schools abroad."
Italians abroad can also rely on courses of language and culture, established 'in favour of Italian workers and their relatives who emigrated', as the law reads...
"That's correct. Despite the single juridical source, in practice those courses have different shapes and organization in the different countries, related to the characteristics of Italian emigration, the needs of the socio-cultural context and the peculiarities of the local education systems. In countries where Italian emigration has reached the third or fourth generation and uses the language of the new country, the teaching of Italian is taught as a foreign language, addressing those who wish to reconstruct their multiple cultural identity through the study of the language and culture of origin of their ancestors, but also those locals who are interested in learning our language."
What about these interested locals? Is their number on the rise?
"So much so, especially in the Americas and Australia, that Italian language courses are frequently included in regular curricula. In the USA, for instance, Italian language and culture are being taught in over 500 high schools. Since you like figures so much, I'll tell you that for 2001-2002 almost half a million students attended these courses. To be precise, 205,000 in Australia, 105,000 in Europe, 100,000 in Latin America, 85,000 in North America, and 500 in South Africa."
How are these courses organized?
"In two parallel ways. First, by entrusting the course to staff of the Ministry of Education sent from Italy (some 500 people all over the world), and this is the formula most used in Europe; second, by entrusting the courses to local private institutions, the so called Management Institutions, financially supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This formula is most used outside Europe."
How many lecturers of Italian teach in foreign universities?
"Currently we have 272 lecturers; 150 in Europe, about 50 in the Americas, 35 in Asia and Oceania, 25 in the Mediterranean basin and in the Middle East, and a dozen or so in sub-Saharan Africa."
What are the countries accommodating the highest number of Italian lecturers?
"The top 10 are Germany (22), France (18), the United Kingdom (14), Spain (13), Argentina, Brazil and Australia (10 each), USA (9), China (8), and Poland (7)."
In addition to this structure, patiently and clearly illustrated, there are the Istituti Italiani di Cultura.
"Institutions of extreme international prestige, our feather in the cap. Despite their meagre financial resources, they act as a precious link between the cultural energy and educational structures of the countries where they operate and authoritative representatives of contemporary Italian culture or Italian institutions specialized in linguistic research. Moreover, the Istituti organize their own language courses: Tullio De Mauro's research on those courses found that Italian is among the world's five most studied languages. I know that you are aware of these data, but I insist on them in order to complete the survey: in 2000, over 45,000 students attended a course of an Istituto di Cultura, a 40 percent increase on 1995."
Do these training courses for teachers of Italian abroad yield good results?
"Yes, they do, but they're not enough. We need to organize more of them, but most of all we need to improve the procedures for recruiting teachers of Italian abroad. We also need to promote constant training, especially outside of Europe. In many refresher courses that I held in the past few years, I happened to hear some Italian-Australian teachers saying things like 'Ho andato in Italia'. An Italian-Canadian teacher made me read an article that he had published in a local paper with expressions like quanto stà succedento, da non dimendicare, un paio di anni fà, il capitalismo occidentale ha una grande sfida davanti a se, with se, a reflexive pronoun, written without the accent. Similar cases are not as rare as one might think. Precisely because Italian is evidencing a great capability to attract foreigners, those who teach it must know it perfectly."

Publication Date: 2003-04-20
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2641