How to boost Italian, in general

Nearly ninety years have passed since Antonio Gramsci, former linguist and student of Matteo Bartoli in Turin, noted in the Quaderni del carcere that "every time the language question emerges, in one way or another, it means that a series of other problems are imposing themselves: the formation and enlargement of the ruling class, the need to establish more intimate and secure relations between the ruling groups and the popular-national mass, that is, to reorganise cultural hegemony". According to the liveliness of the current debates, it seems that today gender is one of the main articulations of the language 'quistion' in Italy: what are we talking about, then, when we discuss language and gender, and what is the relationship with a possible reorganisation of power relations?

There are currently two hot areas of debate: the use of professional femininities and the experimentation with forms that aim to overcome the binary view of gender. These changes and the reactions they provoke are linked to the (also) linguistic dignity and visibility of groups that, not belonging to the hegemonic gender, have traditionally been marginalised, and thus respond to a demand for rights, inside and outside language.

The emergence of the feminine as a desinence (and category) in its own right, no longer automatically included in the over-extended masculine, has a strong symbolic value in the path of women's rights. The Recommendations for a non-sexist use of the Italian language by Alma Sabatini (scholar and feminist, co-founder and first president of the Women's Liberation Movement), drafted between 1986 and 1987 at the urging of the National Commission for Equality and Equal Opportunities between Men and Women promoted by the Council of Ministers, showed the way in this.

It was here that, among various suggestions to make the uses of the Italian language less sexist (which in itself, mind you, would not be sexist: it is the use made of it that is), lists of regular although little-used femininities were presented, such as engineer or architect, lawyer, magistrate, mayor, and their use was recommended. The irony and mockery that accompanied these proposals at the time did not prevent them from spreading, albeit over a long period of time and with non-linear paths, coinciding with the entry of women into professional sectors that had long been precluded to them - a social and linguistic phenomenon, moreover, noted by Bruno Migliorini as early as the 1930s, well in advance of the studies. There remains, however, a certain widespread hostility, a residue of a resistance to change that is losing all reason to exist.

The first steps in the questioning of binarism were taken in militant circles, such as in the LGBTQIA+ communities, within which attempts have long been made to avoid the masculine to denote mixed groups or to refer to non-binary persons, experimenting with a variety of alternative endings: the vowel -u, the consonants -x, -y, -z, the apostrophe, the underscore, symbols such as the snail and the schwa (ə). Regularly presented as bizarre manoeuvres to distort the Italian language 'at the drawing board' or as impositions from above by small groups, these attempts actually speak to us of the search for new ways of experiencing language, both for women and for what the philosopher Chiara Bottici, expanding on Simone de Beauvoir's historical definition, calls the 'second sexes', to indicate all people who do not identify as cisgender males (subjects in whom biological sex assigned at birth and gender identity coincide) and heterosexuals. The discourse is of particular interest to the younger generations, who are more familiar with the concept of fluidity.