Italian profanity


Italian profanity are profanities that are blasphemous or inflammatory in the Italian language.
The Italian language is a language with a large set of inflammatory terms and phrases, almost all of which originate from the several dialects and languages of Italy, such as the Tuscan dialect, which had a very strong influence in modern standard Italian and is widely known to be based on Florentine language. Several of these words have cognates in other Romance languages, such as Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian and French.
Profanities differ from region to region, but a number of them are diffused enough to be more closely associated to the Italian language and featured in all the more popular Italian dictionaries.

List of profanities in the Italian language

Italian writers have often used profanity for the spice it adds to their pages. This is an example from a seventeenth century collection of tales, the Pentamerone, by the Neapolitan Giambattista Basile:
This tirade could be translated like this:
Francis Ford Coppola had some characters in The Godfather use untranslated profanity. For instance, when Sonny Corleone found out that Paulie Gatto had sold out his father to the Barzinis, he called Gatto "that stronz'". Also when Connie Corleone learned Carlo Rizzi was cheating on her, Carlo snapped: "Hey, vaffancul', eh?". Connie yelled back: "I'll vaffancul' you!".

Blasphemous profanity

Profanities in the original meaning of blasphemous profanity are part of the ancient tradition of the comic cults, which laughed and scoffed at the deity. In Europe during the Middle Ages, the most improper and sinful "oaths" were those invoking the body of the Lord and its various parts – as the expression of the dialect of Bergamo pota de Cristo – and these were precisely the oaths most frequently used.
Nowadays, the most common kind of blasphemous profanity involves the name of God, Christ, Jesus or the Virgin Mary combined with an insult or sometimes an animal, the most used being porco as in porco Dio or cane as in Dio cane or porca Madonna.
Common blasphemous profanity in Italian are: porco Dio, Dio cane, Dio merda, Dio bestia, Dio maiale, porco Gesù, Gesù cane, Madonna puttana, porco il Cristo, Dio stronzo, Dio Fauss .
In some areas of Italy, such as Veneto, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Umbria, Marche, Lazio, Abruzzo, Emilia Romagna, Piedmont, Lombardy and Tuscany, blasphemy is more common, but not because of a strong anti-Catholic feeling.. Tuscany and Veneto are the regions where bestemmiare is most common, and in these areas blasphemy appears in the everyday speech almost as an ordinary'' interjection. The historical reasons for this are the various conflicts that these two regions have had with the Vatican..

Gravity

In the Italian language profanities belonging to this category are called bestemmie, in which God, the Virgin Mary, Jesus, the Saints or the Roman Catholic Church are insulted. This category is so strong it is usually frowned upon even by people who would make casual or even regular use of the profanities above.
Bestemmiare is a misdemeanor in Italian law, but the law is seldom enforced. However, it is still considered a strong social taboo at least on television. For example, anyone caught uttering bestemmie in the Italian Big Brother "must be immediately expelled" because they offend "millions of believers". Uttering bestemmie is widely seen as a vice and is often listed together with smoking, drinking and substance abuse.

Legal status

Until 1999, uttering blasphemies in public was considered a criminal misdemeanor in Italy, while nowadays it has been downgraded to an administrative misdemeanor. Some local administrations still ban the practice. For example, after the curate complained about the frequency of blasphemous profanity in the parish recreation centre, the comune of Brignano Gera d'Adda banned the practice in the civic centre and in all places of retail business, be it public or private. As of July 2011, the laws in force in Italy identifies as a bestemmia only the profanities related directly to God. Any insult to Mary or the various saints do not actually represent a bestemmia or any violation of existing laws and rules.

Minced oaths

These profanities are also commonly altered to minced oaths with very slight changes in order not to appear blasphemies. For instance:
Other minced oaths can be created on the fly when people begin to utter one of the above blasphemies, but then choose to "correct" them in real time. The principal example is somebody beginning to say Dio cane and choosing to say instead Dio cantante or Dio cantautore. Also it is very common to say Dio caro, meaning "dear God" or Dio bono or Dio bonino or Dio bonazzo instead of Dio boia. A peculiar minced oath created on the fly, especially popular among Italian teenagers, has the form of a rhyme and read as follows: "Dio can...taci il Vangelo, Dio por...taci la pace!" and it means "God, sing to us the Gospel, God bring us peace!".
Cristo! or Cristo santo!, used to express rage and/or disappointment, is usually not considered a bestemmia, though it may be assumed to violate the second commandment of not making "wrongful use of the name of the Lord Thy God".

Trivia

Especially in Tuscany and Veneto, oftentimes blasphemy becomes an amusement; people show their inspiration by making original and complicated bestemmie usually concatenated and inclusive of all the Sacred Family and their saints.