I luoghi immaginari dell’alterità. Rappresentazioni simboliche e definizioni linguistiche

The essay focuses on the relationship between identity and diversity from a reflection on the relevance of this oppositional pair in the history of recent Western thought. The relationship between languageand the representation of diversity is the starting pointfor reading some linguistic expressions that denote what isdiverse and negatively stigmatized. Examples of languages other than Italian show some universal and peculiar characters of the linguistic representation of otherness.