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 is a trend aiming 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 e
quivalent. 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 19
thcentury).However,managerhas developed into a very successful general purpose term in Italian, generating a wide range of compounds,
vice versa engineerhas given rise to several compounds but has not been integrated as a standalone lexical
item. Our data indicates that the reasons for thesuccess of managerare linked to its equivalents not being
domain-specific, whereas for engineerthe existence of the Italian cognate ingegnere, formally similar but
semantically different, prevents the assimilation of this Anglicism. The data discussed a
re 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.