«Per alfine abolire il barbarico grido...». Frammenti di xenofobia linguistica e onomaturgia nella prima metà del Novecento

This article clarifies the birth of the fascist motto “Eia eia eia ! Alalà !”, born from an idea by Gabriele D’Annunzio during the First World War as the motto of the Italian nascent aviation. This motto – like D’Annunzio’s other onomastic creations – anticipates some lexical choices of fascist purism, in particular as regards the rejection of foreign words, which increasingly upsets the years of linguistic xenophobia. However, the Purism of fascist era is very different from the nineteenth-century Purism : in fact, while the purists of the Nineteenth century suggest using existing Italian terms to replace foreign words, the twenty-century Purism goes so far as to reinvent the lexicon, replacing the foreign words with italian neologisms. But this solution repudiates one of the key assumptions of the original model, as it helps to expand the Italian vocabulary with new words, where, on the contrary, the purists of the previous century wanted to ban, along with the foreign words, also the italian new words.