L’italiano accademico non è più scientifico? Alcune considerazioni e una proposta.

The paper questions itself right from the title on the role of Italian in academic and scientific communication, trying to give an initial answer already in the subtitle, which expresses the authors’ position. The Italian language is in a situation of progressive erosion in the academic and technical-scientific fields compared to English; a notional defence also established by law is matched by a practice of progressive reduction in use, precisely in those contexts in which this use should be supported. In the first part of our article, we introduce an ongoing research project developed at the University of Perugia on oral communication in academic field. Its aim is to create an electronic corpus that will allow us to describe and investigate the current situation. We then highlight the fact that this erosion also affects other European languages that, like Italian, have a long tradition, in a context in which globalisation and the quanti fication of research tend to reduce the importance of multilingualism and translation and, gradually, leads to a shift in scientific paradigms. Our proposal is based on an invitation to maintain and promote the use of Italian in academic and scientific communication, particularly in the perspective of Open Science. An important support could certainly be the creation of a large, dedicated portal featuring multidisciplinary works, programmatically named after Galileo.