by Aldo Grassini.
TedX Festival: Talk “the word”, Ancona, 27th September 2025.
The weight of the word? Consider these expressions: “In the beginning was the Word”; “Words are stones”; “I give you my word”; “This is the last word.”
The meaning of a word is different for the speaker and the listener. It is the epitome of a life experience. Is the meaning of the word “home” the same for someone who lives in a skyscraper of New York and for someone who lives in a favela of Rio de Janeiro? Or even in Ancona, between those who have always lived in the Passetto district and those who have always lived in the Archi district?
Language is made of words. But if also words are problematic, imagine language! Language contains the experience of people. It always deserves respect and dignity. Offending a language is the same of offending a culture.
There are more advanced languages, more used for the number of speakers; but there aren’t superior languages.
Language is the identity of people. Religion is not that identity (there are people who embrace different religions), nor territory (there are people scattered across multiple territories).
There are nations with different people and therefore different languages.
The dominant people impose their language in various ways. The oppression of people very often begins with language. One thing no one wanted to point out: in one of his peace proposals, Putin called for Russian to become the official language of Ukraine.
Language is an expression of a culture, a civilization.
English (today, we should say American English) is a fast-paced language, made up of many monosyllables, perfect for sports commentary. French is an elegant language in its meanings and sounds. French People (especially women) express themselves softly; they pay great attention to form. German is made up of long, often compound words. It is a slow (not in sounds but in concepts) and thoughtful language. It is the language of philosophy.
Italian is a language beloved by foreigners for its musicality. A vowel-based language, with clear, melodious sounds, made for singing; it expresses imaginative people who love the sweet life.
Italian is the language of music due to its vowel structure and the variety of tonic accents: truncated, flat, antepenultimate-stressed, and pre-antepenultimate-stressed words. Here’s an example:
“Ei fu. Siccome immobile,
dato il mortal sospiro,
stette la spoglia immemore
orba di tanto spiro,
così percossa, attonita
la terra al nunzio sta …”
Beyond any aesthetic consideration, this is music. Try translating the same musicality into French: it’s impossible! antepenultimate-stressed words are missing, and the flat ones always end with a semi-vowel.
Italian is an international language in some contexts. The Pope’s speeches in Italian are addressed to a billion Catholics, and, remaining in the realm of music, let’s not forget that Italy invented Opera and its style of singing, which in less than a century, between the 17th and 18th centuries, conquered the World. All the World’s great cities still have their own Opera Houses. Italian Operas are the most performed and almost always in Italian. The greatest Opera singers, even foreign ones, speak Italian and possess perfect pronunciation.
Of course, some of today’s fashionable Italian singers write their songs in English. Together with language, you adopt the rhythms, musicality, sound, but also the content of a different culture.
McLuhan taught us that the message coincides with the instrument. Speaking a language means thinking in that language and transmitting the values and ways of life – in short, the culture – of that people. On the other hand, history has taught us that the language of the masters always becomes the master language. This is the essence of cultural colonialism, and the colonized people usually actively strive to resemble the more powerful people in every way, including the use of other people’s language. A national language has never been and never will be a neutral language.
Italians (and not only) are today renouncing their identity. Young people are no longer having children and want to work abroad. There seems to be no future for Italy. In a globalized world, everyone tends to become “American”.
In Italy, neologisms are no longer created. English ones are adopted. Every day, a certain number of Italian words are replaced with English ones for with no apparent reason. Titles, important concepts, even certain legal principles are expressed in English.
Beware: a language without neologisms is a dead language, and in a few decades (not many, unlikely) Italian language will be like Latin one: specialists will study it, but it will disappear from modern communication, except for colloquial use such as dialects. It will be the decline of a culture and a civilization. Furthermore, one of our most prestigious universities, the Polytechnic University of Milan, stopped using Italian language, and many other universities are tending to follow that example starting with some courses.
Losing a language means losing own identity, and we Italians have nothing to be proud of. While we cannot boast of any great military victories in our history (and I would say “fortunately”), we could nevertheless cite almost ten names (holding us tight) who gave a decisive contribution to World history: Dante, Petrarca, Galileo, Alessandro Volta, Cesare Beccaria (many do not know that he wrote “On Crimes and Punishments” and it is one of the three or four most translated works in the World), Marconi, Leonardo, Raffaello, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Leopardi, Pirandello, and yes, even De Sica and Fellini.
I’ve discarded a lot. And in music, I even cut further: we have Guido d’Arezzo, perhaps many don’t even know him who he invented the possibility of writing music. Without him, the Western musical tradition might have ended up like the music of Ancient Greece, which we don’t know because there was no way to write it down then. And then: Palestrina, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, the Stradivari family and the modern violin, Rossini, Bellini, Verdi, Puccini…
What do we have to do? Let’s throw everything away in the name of a certain concept of modernity, don’t we?
As we said, English is the language of speed and, since time is money, also the language of business, of wealth. Well perhaps because I’m old, but between Dante Alighieri and the control of Wall Street, I keep Dante!
We said that a national language has never been and never can be a neutral language. But what about Esperanto?
Esperanto is not the language of any specific people and cannot represent the model of any specific way of life. Indee, it is the language of a culture: the culture of peace, about which one cannot be neutral.
It’s not true, as is sometimes foolishly claimed, that Esperanto seeks to replace all other languages. The opposite is true: its official name is “international auxiliary language,” and it aims to be a tool for international communication among other languages, large and small, all of which must be respected and protected.
Esperanto is not the language of master people and cannot become the master language.
One final consideration. When asked what Esperanto is, some clearly poorly informed media communicators often reply that Esperanto was a wonderful project that unluckily failed.
But, please: Esperanto is 138 years old. Who decided that 138 years is too long to achieve final victory, that is, becoming the universal tool of international communication?
If we consider that Esperanto has no political power behind it, nor any economic power to finance it; there is no state mandating its learning in schools; that it is a purely voluntary movement, and that, nevertheless, after 138 years, during which it was even persecuted during the Second World War by a blind nationalism that could not tolerate it. In short, after 138 years, it is still alive and well, it is in every country in the world, used every year as a working language on dozens, perhaps hundreds of international occasions, capable of offering translations of the most important works of all national literatures, but above all, it is used regularly by thousands upon thousands of people in every field of knowledge and in every situation of social life-well, considering all this, should we call it a failure or a true miracle?