Dialettale, regionale, nazionale: identità linguistiche nella descrizione della lingua del cibo

Abstract

Food and, consequently, the language that describes it represent one of the areas of culture and language in which there has been the strongest assertion of an identity model. This is the result of the sum of different local components. Until the beginning of the 20th century (essentially until the lesson of Pellegrino Artusi), the gastronomic lexicon had moved toward Frenchizing models (i.e. Francesco Leonardi’s Apicio moderno). During the last century, it rapidly descended into an essentially national dimension but also with a kind of “globalization” of the typical product, whereby it is natural to find Sicilian cannoli in Bozen and strudel in Palermo), and finally local, with the revaluation of local products (for example, with the defense and valorization of slow food). Added to this is the progressive expansion of the space that the language of food has in dictionaries and also in the “vocabolario di base” of Italian (significant in this regard are the entries made in the Nuovo De Mauro with respect to GRADIT): precisely by starting from the description of the lexicon of food in the Italian lexicography of use, an interpretation of the relationship between Italian, regionalism and dialectalism in the describing of an identity share of the Italian lexicon will be proposed.