Migratismi di moda

The lexicon of immigrant writers in Italy is full of words derived from their mother tongues. Among the semantic fields most involved is undoubtedly that of fashion. We find many clothes, dresses, fabrics typical of the areas of emigration to Italy: Arab world, states of sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and Asia. Some of these are attested in Italian for a long time now (burnus, fez, sari); others are very recent, in correlation with migration and the presence of immigrant communities in Italy. The term ‘migratismo’ has been proposed for this class of words. Some ‘migratismi’ have already spread in Italian and recorded in vocabularies (for example the veils of Islamic women: burqa, hijab, niqab). Their circulation has produced derived and compound words (burkini, antiburqa). Others are well detectable in the italian literature of migration, where the authors explain the meaning with a gloss or in a note. Searches in archives and databases allow to understand the real circulation of these words.