«Il torto e il diritto del non si può»: Neopurism vs the power of usage in Italian linguistic chronicles of the new millennium

Main Italian national newspapers do not dedicate a lot of space to linguistic ideologies and lexico- grammatical debates. Instead, if we consider Italian local newspapers and especially the web, the most recent debate on language is large and very interesting. In this chapter we will consider some long- lived linguistic chronicles in Italian press, starting from the columns in La Sicilia and Famiglia Cristiana. Furthermore, we will analyze more recent outlets: linguistic articles in Internationale, Il Nuovo Quotidiano di Puglia, websites of language counseling (Crusca, DICO), etc. The conservative attitude of non- experts is perhaps the result of the teaching of grammar in Italian schools. On the other hand, the attitude of professional linguists (Sgroi, Marazzini, Coluccia, De Mauro) and communication scholars (Testa, Zoli) is always very openminded and awake to Italian language changes, it has a very elastic concept of the linguistic “norm” and thus use as less as it possible the concept of “error”. It almost seems, according to the purist attitude of the general public, that the strict interpretation of the rules and errors serves as a compass needle against disorientation of the language common use, a use inevitably alive and therefore changing, multifaceted and always be renegotiated among users.