La voce di New York (2013–2022): la lingua italiana vista oltreoceano

66 articles in the linguistic field of the online newspaper La voce di New York, written between 2013 and 2022, are analyzed with the aim of probing the main theoretical themes and orientations of one of the most important media of/on/for the Italians of America. From all the articles emerges a varied and lively debate on today’s Italian, in some respects richer than that of the generalist press in Italy. The main nodes of today’s Italian are well represented in the newspaper: from the relationship with English to that with dialects, from gender issues to educational ones, from political correctness to legislation on linguistic minorities, from the new plurilingualism to the supposed decadence of Italian and much more. Considerable attention is also devoted to the positions of the Accademia della Crusca and to linguistic and scholastic policy issues. All this demonstrates how, even today, the problems associated with the new, or so called “very new”, question of the Italian language can be said to be anything but dormant, at least abroad. The corpus, thanks to the open attitude of the newspaper, ranges from the purist traditionalism of some articles to the anti-purist nonconformism of Luca Passani, who puts the “lay” suggestions of S.C. Sgroi on the preference of the indicative over the subjunctive, on the apostrophized spelling of qual’è, etc. The communicative style of the articles moves between the explanatory-popular, the evaluative-prescriptive and the critical-argumentative levels.