On December 23, 1940, the Senate and the Chamber of Fasci and Corporations, through their legislative commissions, approved the law n. 2042 on linguistic matters, providing:
"The use of foreign words in the headings of industrial or commercial companies and professional activities is prohibited. [...] Violators of the provisions of this law are punished with imprisonment for up to six months or with a fine of up to 5,000 lire. "
The struggle for the Italianization of the language has its roots in its debut of the Mussolini government. Already starting from 1923 those activities were affected which used a foreign name, but the Italian synonym was available. Coiffeur, bar, garage, fell under increased tax linked precisely to the use of these terms in their own name, while tram, rum, the, were exempted.
The visceral, often grotesque, struggle against the use of terms non-Italians had as its ultimate goal to strengthen the national primacy even in simple everyday life. Italian had to overcome everything and everyone even in the spoken language.
Achille Starace's rise to the secretariat of the National Fascist Party certainly marked the exasperation of this line of fascism in the daily life of Italians. It was he who established and made mandatory some of the forms with which fascism proposed to characterize the public and private life of Italians.
One of the best known is the replacement of the handshake (considered a "softness" Anglo-Saxon) with the Roman salute, encoded down to the angle of the outstretched arm, which had to rise 170 degrees from the torso, with the fingers of the outstretched hand, joined. This was followed by the use of the you instead of the lei in the spoken and written language and the compulsory use of the uniform on Saturdays during the weekly celebrations of the Fascist Saturday and at holidays. He passed a directive according to which the word DUCE was to be written exclusively with all capital letters. He also proposed to institute the obligation to conclude all private letters with the phrase Viva il DUCE, but Mussolini, reasonably, sensing what effect could have arisen in the case of not cheerful letters, for example in messages of condolence, or of unpleasant communications. , categorically forbade it, despite his insistence.
Behind these propaganda ideas, however, lies the direction of Mussolini. It is he who, in essence, gives orders and directives through the figure of Starace. The Duce said of him that yes, he was an idiot, but he was "an obedient idiot!".
Mussolini saw in him the perfect accomplice, a shadow that will never cast a shadow on him, and for this reason he will keep him at the Party Secretariat for eight years, the most enduring post of the twenty years.
Returning to the discourse on language, Mussolini commissioned a Bulletin from the Royal Academy of Italy that "provides the list of banned foresters", about 500 terms that were banned from Italian vocabularies and replaced with Italian synonyms. In the morning, the Italians ate brioche instead of brioche or pantosto, drank champagne and not champagne, the richest went to dance halls or concert cafés while the majority watched films and no longer films.
At campaigns of the People of Italy for the purism of the language, was joined in 1932 by the Turin Gazzetta del Popolo, publishing 300 daily cards to clean our language from the weeds of foreign words that have invaded and marred every field.
The sanctions of 1935 and the exit from the League of Nations did nothing but exacerbate the persecution of the Party against everything that was not Italian. Economic autarchy also became linguistic, both on the Peninsula and in the newborn Empire.
There was a terrible campaign against the Eden hotel (in the meantime become a hotel) in Rome. It was expected to change its name, as it shared it with the British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, and the explanations of the management that explained how the term had nothing to do with the British but was Latin were of no avail.
The struggle the international football team (now Inter) also hit the xenophilia, which also drew elements of socialism, which was ordered to be called Ambrosiana. Thus, in 1933 the most widely read women's magazine in Italy, Lei, reminiscent of a Frenchism, was forced to change its name to Annabella.
The burgundy color became the Barolo color, the Prince of Wales fabric was simply the main fabric, and terms as a Russian salad and a wrench, as evocators of enemy nations, they became a tricolor salad and a wrench. In the cinema also for the purpose of censoring and adapting foreign films, dubbing was ordered. To dub American, French and German films, they were called theater actors, giving rise to the occupation of the voice actor, previously non-existent.
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