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English-Mediated Instruction in Italian Universities: Conflicting Views

The provocative epigraph is taken from the book: “Che ogni italiano debba scrivere in lingua purgata italiana” [“About the need to use purified Italian in writing”, our translation] written by Antonio Vallisneri, an eighteenth century Italian medical scientist and well-known scholar whose innovative ideas on Galilean experimental science strongly impacted on the future of scientific knowledge. By bravely choosing Italian instead of Latin as the language of scientific writing not only did Vallisneri pave the way to the popularisation of science but also favoured the development of Italian as a language for knowledge dissemination. In the foreword to a newly-published edition of this book, edited by Dario Generali (2013), the editor claims that the past intellectual history of subalternity to Latin challenged by forerunners like Vallisneri, echoes the progressive intellectual history of subalternity to English in our times by Italian scholars who today are ready to adopt English even in University courses. According to Dario Generali this linguistic policy would only favour: “the creation of an Anglophone élite to the detriment of the Italian language and culture, which are the cornerstones of our richest and enviable tradition and intellectual identity” (Generali 2013: 6, our translation). Despite the commonalities between the hegemonic role played by Latin in the past and the one played by English today, the two situations are only apparently similar. First, Latin was nobody’s mother tongue and did not embody any specific national culture; as a