Lingua e potere in Pier Paolo Pasolini

Analysing different forms of human language and its powers, the issue of language-dialect connections, strictly intertwined with politics and society, represent one of the author’s main concerns and, at the same time, a constant feature of Pasolini’s work. Pasolini never compromised on what he believed to be his «primary» duty as an intel­lectual: «To perform, first and foremost, a critical examination of the facts». Since youth, he conceived of this examination as a continuous assessment, continuous focussing of his periscope to the horizon of phenomena, opposing ideologues of every kind who always did the opposite. He was therefore amongst the first to glimpse the dawn of a new histori­cal era that —in addition to eliminating the traits of an ancient agricultural civilization, which still defined most of Italy in the early ’60s— would eventually «anthropologically» transform Italians. This article aims to demonstrate the above by reviewing all of the author’s works, not only his linguistic ones, and to focus on some pieces that are lesser-known, rarely studied or neglected by critics.