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Cringe, aura and the dialect

Cringe, aura and the dialect

From a headline on L’Arena to a question about Italian

“From aura to cringe, the words of Gen Z: Italian is a language in motion. Our dialect? It won’t disappear.” The Verona daily packed the whole matter into a single line, and deserves credit for refusing to frame it as a national emergency.

Every few months the same liturgy goes on stage. Someone notices that fifteen-year-olds say aura to mean charisma, that cringe has replaced embarrassing, that a good result “slaps”, and out comes the appeal to defend the national tongue from barbarism. Anyone who has handled copy for twenty-five years recognises the script: it already aired for emo, for apericena, for vaping, for a long queue of entries that later settled into dictionaries while the country stayed upright. The mechanism resembles what I described in a piece on inclusive language, where alarm always arrives before habit.

What the Istat figures say about Italian and dialects

The Istat report released in January 2026 covers 2024 and dismantles a few impressions. At home, 53.6% of the population relies only or mainly on Italian, among friends the share climbs to 58.7%, with strangers it reaches 82.6%.

Local speech, though, holds on: 42% of respondents use it in at least one setting, alone or alternating with the national idiom, peaking at 38% within the family. The decline is real and sharp over the long run, since between 1988 and 2024 predominant dialect use at home slid from 32% to 9.6%. Yet moving from sole code to affective register sits a long way from extinction.

In Veneto, 55.3% of residents keep the local variety in exclusive or alternating form. On that count, the Verona headline has the numbers on its side. The picture shifts considerably on a planetary scale, where two millennia have thinned idiomatic diversity dramatically, as I recounted while looking at the 75,000 lost languages.

Who actually decides which items enter dictionaries

Here comes the part that interests me most, professionally too. Whenever a lexical novelty circulates, the collective instinct is to summon an authority that will reject or bless it. The Accademia della Crusca gets called in as though it were a customs office.

Rita Librandi, vice president of the Florentine institution, has put it plainly: only the use that the linguistic community demonstrates over a significant stretch of time sanctions the admission of a word. The Accademia can assess whether a coinage respects Italian formation rules, can study it, describe it, explain its history. Granting or denying entry falls outside its remit.

Vera Gheno, who worked in that editorial team for years, repeats the point with a dry formula: the body has a descriptive role rather than a prescriptive one, and “the language is made by its speakers”.

The petaloso case and the misunderstanding it carries

In 2016 Matteo, eight years old, a third-grader at the Marchesi school in Copparo, invented petaloso during a lesson on adjectives. His teacher Margherita Aurora sent the coinage to Florence, and the reply went viral.

It is worth rereading, because almost everyone remembers it backwards. The Accademia wrote that the adjective was well formed and usable like others built the same way, peloso or coraggioso, then added a condition: to reach the dictionaries, many people would have to adopt it and understand it. No clearance, no stamp. A short treatise in historical grammar dressed up as a letter to a child.

Ten years on, petaloso has not settled into the reference works, for the reason given back then: Italians celebrated it and never used it. The episode remains valuable all the same, because it made public a process that schools rarely explain.

Zingarelli and Treccani record the slang coming off screens

Lexicographers, meanwhile, get on with the job: they observe frequency, measure persistence, update. The 2026 Zingarelli took in gaslighting, amichettismo, aporofobia, bromance, turistificare, alongside hybrids that make purists wince, such as flexare, skillato, ghostare, whatsappare. Stefano Bartezzaghi called them coinages that look like escapees from a laboratory of fantasy linguistics, faintly ridiculous and by now unavoidable.

Anyone working on brand names knows this dynamic well, and I covered it in a piece on poets, futurists and brand naming. The Treccani observatory, for 2025, flagged occhi spaccanti, ingiocabile, maranza, romantasy, tornanza and allucinazione dell’intelligenza artificiale. Its own editors warn that time alone will tell which ones survive.

What I find elegant about the system is the absence of guarantees for anybody. The repertoire notes, the community confirms or forgets, the next edition adjusts its aim.

Venetian between regional law and a dictionary-worthy cicchetto

That same Zingarelli edition also welcomed voices from the provinces: Venetian cicchetto, Sicilian busiata, Roman friccicarello. So the traffic runs in every direction.

Veneto also has a legal framework, regional law 8 of 2007 on the protection, enhancement and promotion of its linguistic and cultural heritage, flanked by other measures on local identity. A statute on its own has never persuaded a single household to change its lexicon, yet it funds archives, research and school projects, and over a long horizon that counts.

Writing from Milan after growing up in Pescara teaches how ancestral speech behaves: I hardly ever produce it, I recognise it instantly, and it returns to my mouth the moment I walk down to the neighbourhood market near the Stadio Adriatico. It stays an emotional lane, a password of belonging. Passwords rarely die by decree, or because of cringe.

What this means for people producing content and interfaces

On the professional side the question turns very concrete. Anyone working in localization, UX writing and microcopy faces lexical choices that age fast, and glossaries that need reviewing the way stock gets reviewed.

A few criteria I apply:

  • Observe before deciding. An item appearing in three posts has no history yet. One that holds across two seasons and several registers does.
  • Separate audience from tone. Aura works in a social campaign aimed at eighteen-year-olds and jars in a banking error screen.
  • Distrust generational labels. Plenty of expressions credited to Gen Z have circulated in newsrooms, offices and television schedules for ages, much like the buying behaviour I described around nonna maxxing and the fading appeal of the moped.
  • Refresh glossaries on a fixed cadence. Two revisions a year prevent both stale jargon and a breathless chase after the fad of the month.

I admit without much embarrassment that the first time I met delulu my face matched that of someone reading a contract in Flemish. Asking for an explanation cost far less than pretending.

Cultivating idiomatic heritage without putting it under glass

A living idiom evolves with society and with everyday practice. Recording novelties in reference works leaves collective memory its full space and keeps it company: cicchetto and gaslighting sit on the same page of updates quite peacefully.

Local varieties survive by being spoken, sung, told to children, carried into theatre workshops and kitchens. Institutions can document and fund them. No committee will ever protect them by banning anglicisms among teenagers, just as no committee managed to stop computer from beating calcolatore.

The Verona paper got it right. Italian is moving, Venetian heritage still has solid roots, and whoever works with words would do well to keep the notebook open instead of the vocabulary locked.

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Chiara Bonifazi