'Dirty Words' and Multilingualism in Maddalena Fingerle’s Novel Lingua madre

Abstract

This article analyzes the novel Lingua madre (2021) by Maddalena Fingerle, focusing on the representation of multilingualism and on the poetics of 'dirty words'. At the center of the narrative is Paolo Prescher, a synesthetic protagonist who perceives words in a sensory and pathological manner: 'dirty' words contaminate him and compromise his linguistic identity. Italian, his mother tongue, becomes an impure language, which leads him to leave Bolzano and choose to speak only German in Berlin. The article explores the complexity of literary multilingualism through two main levels: the dialogic level, in which the shift in language reflects identity and cultural tensions, and the lexical level, in which individual words (such as Fremdschämen, Schadenfreude, or Dose) trigger emotional and synesthetic associations. Fingerle deconstructs the romanticization of South Tyrolean plurilingualism and offers a critical reflection on linguistic identity, contamination, and the corporeality of language.