English job titles in italian : the Case of Manager and Engineer

In a globalized job market, the use of English job titles to advertise vacancies and positions in non-English-speaking countries is becoming increasingly frequent. This trend seems to be primarily motivated by the desire to give jobs an international appeal. While some job titles fill lexical gaps and are successfully integrated, others enter in competition with national equivalents, generating ‘multiple terminology’ in the receiving languages. The aim of this paper is to identify the stylistic and pragmatic reasons which determine the success of an Anglicism in the receiving language, despite the existence of a domestic equivalent. To this end, we have conducted a linguistic analysis of two terms used in the Italian job market – manager and engineer – which have entered the Italian language in the same historical period (end of the 19th century). However, manager has developed into a very successful general purpose term in Italian, generating a wide range of compounds, vice versa engineer has given rise to several compounds but has not been integrated as a standalone lexical item. Our data indicates that the reasons for the success of manager are linked to its equivalents not being domain-specific, whereas for engineer the existence of the Italian cognate ingegnere, formally similar but semantically different, prevents the assimilation of this Anglicism. The data discussed are drawn from general and specialized dictionaries, official descriptions of occupations in Italian and in English, and from web corpora queried through the Sketch Engine system.