Enough with “avvocata” and also with “sindaca”. A proposed law by the League aims to prohibit in public documents “the feminine gender for neologisms applied to institutional titles of the State, military ranks, professional titles, honours, and roles identified by documents having the force of law”.
The text, signed by the Lega senator, Manfredi Potenti, is still a draft to be submitted to the drafting but is already very clear in its preamble: “This law intends to preserve the integrity of the Italian language and in particular, to avoid the improper modification of public titles, such as ‘Mayor’, ‘Prefect’, ‘Questor’, ‘Lawyer’ by ‘symbolic’ attempts to adapt their definition to the different sensibilities of the time“.
“It is necessary to prevent the legitimate battle for gender equality, in order to achieve visibility and consensus in society, from resorting to these excesses that do not respect institutions”, it is explained. And, for this reason, it is considered “necessary a regulatory intervention that implies a containment of creativity in the use of the Italian language in institutional documents”.
Article 3 on the use of the Italian language in public documents clearly states the “prohibition of discretionary recourse to the feminine or overextended form or to any linguistic experimentation. The use of the double form or the universal masculine is permitted, to be understood in a neutral sense and without any sexist connotation”.
The aim – as stated in Article 1 – is “to preserve the public administration from literal deformations deriving from the need to affirm gender equality in public texts”.
Fines are a separate chapter (Article 5): “Violation of the obligations set forth in this law entails the application of an administrative pecuniary sanction consisting of the payment of a sum ranging from 1,000 to 5,000 Euros”.