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Oct. 31 - Nov. 7, 2004 |
1 - The Italian language on the rise
La bella lingua is among five most studied courses in the world for non-Italian students
By Antonio Maglio
Originally Published: 2002-12-01
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Linguistics scholar Tullio De Mauro
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In 1995, the students attending Italian language courses abroad were 33,065; by 2000 the figure had grown to 45,699 (+38.2 percent). As to the number of courses, in 1995 they numbered 2,346 and employed 628 teachers; in 2000 they were 3,684 (+57 percent) with 686 teachers (+8.4 percent).
These data appear in Italiano 2000, a survey commissioned by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Tullio De Mauro, one of Italy's most authoritative linguists (he also served as Minister of Education), about the reasons why foreigners study Italian.
The survey, carried out by De Mauro and by a research team of Siena's University for Foreigners (Massimo Vedovelli, Monica Barni and Lorenzo Miraglia), revealed that Italian is among the world's five most studied foreign languages. It's behind the unreachable English and still distant from French (which is steadily declining, however), and almost on a par with German and Spanish.
News like this gives hope to those who despaired of seeing Italian survive in a globalized world, and who now scramble to understand such vitality. But this is hardly unexpected, since other positive indicators were already known. For instance, Italian ranks 19th among all the languages, even though Italians make up just one percent of the world's population; and three percent of all web pages are written in Italian, a remarkable figure considering the recent birth and almost exclusively Anglophone character of the Internet.
The Italiano 2000 survey was prepared with the Istituti Italiani di Cultura, involved in data collection about their own initiatives as well as those of other organizations managing courses of Italian abroad.
In the late Seventies, the Istituto per l'Enciclopedia Italiana (Italian Encyclopedia Institute) asked Ignazio Baldelli to conduct another survey on the reasons that made foreigners study Italian. Baldelli ascertained that the reasons were cultural: Italian was studied because it was the language of art, music, great literature, but also of Galileo's science.
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