Lingua inglese - Appunti

Christopher Williams

Associate professor of English at the faculty of political science, University of Bari, Italy

After an encouraging start, the state-sponsored plain language initiative ‘Progetto Chiaro!’ has fizzled out. So Italians are once again left to grapple with the complexities of bureaucratese, an area still in need of drastic reform. I wish to thank Giovanni Vetritto for his invaluable comments.

Anyone who has lived and worked in Italy will be only too aware of the mind-boggling complexity and sluggishness of Italian bureaucracy and of Italy’s legal system. Small wonder, then, that there have been calls for reforming the language of officialdom to make it more user-friendly. But while in Britain, the USA and other English-speaking countries, the plain language movement has mainly found expression outside government institutions, the nearest equivalent in Italy, known as the Progetto Chiaro!, is part of the Department of Public Administration (Dipartimento della Funzione Pubblica).

The Department was set up in 1983 as part of the drive to modernise public administration, but it was only in the 1990s that a concerted effort was made to improve its quality and efficiency. This culminated in the setting up of Chiaro!, the so-called ‘Project for the simplification of administrative language’.

The language of officialdom

One of the characteristics, then, of the plain language movement in Italy is that it has so far concentrated its attention mainly on the language of officialdom and has tended to be less concerned than its English-speaking counterparts with, say, consumer rights such as ensuring that leaflets contained in prescribed medicines are comprehensible to non-experts, or with the language of prescriptive legal texts. Of course, the language of officialdom spills over into the legal field; moreover, in recent years attempts have been made within the Italian Parliament to improve the quality of legislative drafting, as Stefano Murgia and Giovanni Rizzoni pointed out in Clarity No. 47 (May 2002, page 20).

Thus, on the one hand, the focus of the Progetto Chiaro! is more limited than that of, say, the plain English movements in the UK, Australia and Canada but on the other hand, given the pervasiveness of state officialdom in most people’s lives in Italy, the project has undoubtedly hit on the area that was most desperately in need of reform. A guiding source of inspiration behind the proposed reform of bureaucratese has been Alfredo Fioritto whose Manuale di Stile. Strumenti per Semplificare il Linguaggio delle Amministrazioni Pubbliche was first published in 1997. The manual provides practical...