Italian

en-noun

Italian (countable and uncountable, plural Italians)

From Middle English Italian, from Medieval Latin Italiānus, from Latin Italia (“Italy”).

As Di Matteo celebrated and captain John Terry raised the trophy for the fourth time, the Italian increased his claims to become the permanent successor to Andre Villas-Boas by landing a trophy.

2012 May 5, Phil McNulty, “Chelsea 2-1 Liverpool”, in BBC Sport:

(countable) An inhabitant of Italy, or a person of Italian descent.

Simple Cannoli, Lemon Ice, or a delicious Tira Mi Su. With so many wonderful recipes, you can eat Italian anytime.

1995, Betty Crocker's New Italian Cooking, page 5:

(uncountable, cooking) A style of cuisine or individual dishes of or associated with Italy or Italian people.

(uncountable, textiles) Short for Italian cloth, a type of linen or cotton cloth with satin finish used primarily for linings.

Italian cloth

gin and Italian

So the English women would have been interested in American drinks, and in came the gin-and-Italian, for example.

1971, John Doxat, The World of Drinks and Drinking, page 102:

Italian vermouth
Italian vermouth#English

(uncountable) Short for Italian vermouth, a dark-colored sweet or mildly bitter vermouth.

Italian vermouth

Italian sandwich
Italian sandwich#English

(countable, Maine) Short for Italian sandwich.


Cocoliche

Indeed, cocoliche might in some respects be seen as another example of dialectal influence upon Italian – except that in this case the ‘dialect’ is another Romance ‘language’, and not an Italo-Romance variety.

1995, Martin Maiden, A Linguistic History of Italian, Longman, published 2003, page 269:

A pidgin or language continuum formed from Italian and Spanish, spoken in parts of the River Plate region of South America in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.


Tuscan

Tuscan (countable and uncountable, plural Tuscans)

From Middle English Tuscan, from Late Latin Tuscānus (“belonging to the Tusci”), a people of ancient Italy, from Tuscus, earlier *Truscus, shortened form of Etruscus (“Etruscan”).

der

A local variety of Italian spoken in Tuscany, on which Standard Italian is largely based.


Sabir

Le bourgeois gentilhomme
Mediterranean Lingua Franca

From Sabir sabir (“know”), in Molière's Le bourgeois gentilhomme, probably from Spanish saber, ultimately from Latin sapere.

(historical) An Italian-based pidgin language used as the lingua franca of Mediterranean trade from roughly the 11th to the 19th centuries.


Italianization

/ɪˌtæljənəˈzeɪʃən/

The conversion of a non-Italian culture to an Italian one.

(linguistics) The process of adapting lexical elements from a foreign language to the Italian linguistic system.


Old Italian

Old + Italian, on the pattern of Old English

The theory that there was a spontaneous development of an obscure vowel in final position on certain occasions in Old Italian has gained general currency and has been carried on in the works of the main authorities.

1938, George Melville Bolling, Bernard Bloch, Language, volume 14, Linguistic Society of America, page 224:

[… T]his configuration, in which the infinitive clause is a prepositional complement of a noun, could not be found in the documentary evidence of (Tuscan) Old Italian. Another diverging property in this example is the preverbal subject after prepositions, no longer common in Old Italian at the end of the fifteenth century […]
[… T]he examples show the use of nonauxiliary verbs. Though similar to Old Italian, this is another difference from contemporary Italian.

2000, Guido Mensching, Infinitive Constructions with Specified Subjects: A Syntactic Analysis of the Romance Languages, pages 30 and 31 (Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax; →ISBN, 9780195133035)

The continuum of languages derived from Vulgar Latin spoken in the Italian peninsula between circa 960 and the establishment of the Accademia della Crusca in 1582.


Italish

en-adj

Italish (comparative more Italish, superlative most Italish)

more Italish (comparative)
most Italish (superlative)

first Patron S. Frances, as we find in the history of his idolatrous feast, and also in the book of conformities of Frances to Christ, written by an Italish friar called Bartholomew Pisanus.

1849, John Bale, Select works of John Bale D.D. Bishop of Ossory:

“O Italish England,” he wrote, “what has become of your ancient fortitude and might; since Tuscanism has come in, Vanity is above all else, and next comes villainy; there is no one who is not a minion; grand words cover feeble deeds.”

1902, Lewis Einstein, The Italian Renaissance in England:

His independence incurred the wrath of other historians such as Leland, and his Catholicism enraged Bale, who declared that he ‘hath in this point deformed his writings greatly, polluting our English Chronicles most shamefully with his Romish lies and other Italish beggarys’.

1960, Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare:

By coincidence, I am now travelling aboard another Otranto, a spaceship of Italish manufacture. Its engines are silent as it slips through interstellar space towards an artificial Golconda. Not a whisper comes from them.

1995, Brian Wilson Aldiss, The secret of this book: 20-odd stories:

(archaic) Pertaining to Italy, its people, or language; Italian.

Made in the Italian manner, or appearing Italian.


Romanesco

/ɹəʊ.məˈnɛs.kəʊ/

Borrowed from Italian romanesco (“of or pertaining to Rome”).

bor

The dialect of the Italian language spoken in Rome.