A mixed blessing for students of Italian: more English terms have become Italian standards, making it easier to cheat, but more dialect is seeping into everyday Italian making it harder to study. The new edition of the Zingarelli dictionary for 2001 contains terms like “standing ovation,” “appetizer”, “mobbing,” “trolley” and “new economy.” Increase in Internet use has lead to the Italianization of terms like “portal” (portale) to chat (chattare) to clic (cliccare), but terms borrowed from local dialects are increasing too. Examples: Roman (piacione, friccico) Neapolitan (ammoina) and Sardinian (malloreddus). No comment was made from the Accademia della Crusca (Crusca Academy), the national language academy of Italy and the oldest such institution in Europe.

Related resources:
Wordsmith Stefano Bartezzaghi on “italenglish”
www.repubblica.it/online/societa/linguaggio/linguaggio/linguaggio.html
Roman- Italian dictionary
www.turbozaura.com/manuale.html
Introduction to Neapolitan pronunciation, in English
www.duesicilie.org/Neapolitan3.html
Irreverent site, click on “coddabolario” for Sardinian vocab
http://web.tiscalinet.it/codda/index2.html

514 million English speakers
62 million Italian speakers
50,000 (circa) students of Italian worldwide
93 Italian cultural institutes, worldwide

“English, one of the most widely-spoken languages, will form the building blocks for a universal idiom,” was the hypothesis made recently by Peter Schneider in daily Corriere della Sera commenting on “European Year of Languages” conferences held by the EU.
Italys Accademia della Crusca, Europes oldest linguistic watchdog, not only agreed with the “English as the New Latin” concept but may add to the Italian vocabulary with words derived from English.
President Francesco Sabatini, at work revising the Academys prestigious dictionary of the Italian language, told the newspaper linguists are considering adding “Italianized” words to keep up with commonly-used English terms like “devolution” and “performance.”
An odd undertaking for the Academy, founded in 1583, whose name (“crusca” means chaff), implies keeping the Italian language pure. http://ovisun199.csovi.fi.cnr.it/crusca/ Official site of the Accademia unfortunately, they’re too busy deciding the fate of the Italian language to update it very often.