Più inglese che altro: il portfolio linguistico dell'italiano medio alla luce del pastiche comico della Sora Cesira

The texts composed by the Roman singer-song writer hiding behind the pseudonym Sora Cesira, posted on the world wide web since early in 2011, are parodies of famous musical videoclips which capitalise on a mix of Italo-Romance (mostly standard Italian and Romanesco, but with a pinch of further dialects like Neapolitan) and other languages (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, to which more recently also Latin has been added). These texts are analysed here from the viewpoint of the clues they provide as to the linguistic knowledge to be assumed for their ideal addressee to decode them effectively. In fact, in order for them to achieve their intended comic effect, the texts must be understood: therefore, their author(s) must work based on a (probably largely unspoken) hypothesis about the language portfolio of the addressee. As it turns out, there is, quite unsurprisingly, an imbalance between English and all the rest: English, it will be shown, is the only language from which the texts employ words and constructions that are not decodable in the absence of punctual knowledge. In other words, in order to laugh, while listening to Sora Cesira’s Anglo-Italian, some elementary command of English is needed, while this is hardly required for any other of the languages involved, French included (in spite of its having been, until recently, the first foreign language taught in Italian school).