The book just came outItalian and young people. How sorry? I don't follow you” (goWare/Accademia della Crusca, edited by Annalisa Nesi) in digital and printed edition takes stock of contemporary youth language and is a mine of precious new information. What emerges in the contributions of the various scholars who have addressed the question from different perspectives is above all the massive anglicization.
The interference of the English
LEnglish interference and the presence of anglicisms is certainly not new in this area, but if we quantify the phenomenon it seems to be of an order of higher size compared to the language of young people of the past decades.
La US culture and the American myth that has appeared in Italian society since the Fifties , the american dream and the american style, immediately permeated the "youthful" and it has expanded from generation to generation, bringing with it the strong literary, social and above all musical, television and cinematographic suggestions, including linguistic ones.
The advent of Internet , globalization have greatly expanded this phenomenon and in the The nineties someone started talking about "bit generation", with a play on words that started from where it all began: the beatgeneration, followed by the surfing army of the Sixties, Between jeans, hippies, freaks and hippies of Seventies, or the yuppies of the The eighties.
Few years ago, however, among the ten symbol words chosen by the linguist Gianluca Lauta “For a history of youth languages in Italy” (see Il Lungo Sessantotto) included items such as cispo, make out, spinel, just in a new sense, but it wasn't there not even an anglicism.
Neologies in the English language
Today the scenario has completely changed e Michael Cortelazzo (“A new phase in the history of youth lexicon”) in identifying seven stages in the history of juvenile language, which has come down to our days, it includes nine examples of neologies that are no longer Italian, but exclusively in English (cringe, crush, millennials, pov, trend) or borrowed from English through a shorthand (bando, i.e. abandoned house from abandoned house) or fruit of hybridizations (drop, flop, stitch).
What the linguist notes is that, while in the second half of the twentieth century the language of young people was characterized by a strong creative component, In last ten years there has been an interruption in this process and today "it has lost a large part of the variety (social and geographical) that characterized it in order to take more standardized paths based on models transmitted through social networks".
The same "stagnation" is reiterated by Luca Bellone (“From the street to TikTok: on the trail of contemporary youth language”) and in the period 2018 – 2022 Feet notes a "significant reduction in the process of neo-coining of words and expressions of the so-called «innovative and ephemeral slang layer»".
Il boys slang, in fact, it is usually characterized by being transitory, because the new generations create new words with respect to the previous ones and usually, once they reach adulthood, they abandon them, even if a small part of the juvenile lexicon survives and can pass on to the following generations or leave from its environment to enter the Italian language.
Recently, on the contrary, “if anything we are witnessing a consolidation process of voices and expressions of the traditional slang layer (the long-lasting youth language)”.
The language reflects the strong social changes
If we reflect on the reasons for these changes, we must take note that the language, even of young people, is the effect of social changes just as strong.
THEyouth gathering up to the years Eighty was strongly linked to physical sociality and the territory: from politicized student movements to post-ideological identifications connected to meeting places or other cultural and musical elements (paninari, punk, moods, dark). But with the transition from sociability toera of social media the reference points have become those of a de-territorialized virtuality where increasingly i language centers they are no longer in Italy, but come from overseas and a globalization which tends to coincide with an Americanization dictated by the dominant culture that is the protagonist. It is no coincidence that in the stagnation of juvenile language the component of dialect voices, once very strong, but today very modest. If in the past, when military service was compulsory, expressions such as spina or burba came from the military jargon of the "naia", today the same concept, in thefield of video games, is expressed through English “noob”, adaptation of “newbie (perhaps from new boy 'rookie, latest arrival', originally used in the military)”, writes Bellone, which is also declined in other variants (newb, noob, niubie, noob, noob, nabbazzo).
The virtual environment is what nourishes and forms young people and is conceived and created in the United States, sometimes with partial terminological translations, sometimes reproduced directly in English.
Social media spaces
Video Game (called games and populated by players and gamers), music videos, television series, programs and films (with titles now mainly in English), social and IT platforms, viral "memes", advertising and English-speaking goods: these are the reference points with which young people spend hours and hours. Bellone reports some statistics: "Over 98% of whistleblowers aged between 16 and 20 are connected every day and declare that they spend at least 5 hours a day within the spaces offered by social networks". The most used systems are "WhatsApp and Instagram (their percentage of use well exceeds 90% of the sample), followed by TikTok (used by about 75% of the boys) and YouTube (just under 60%)."
The language suffers from this new context which overexposes English and the effects now go well beyond the simple categories of "linguistic loan", because alongside the integral anglicisms the hybridizations, which are in part a adaptation process (the title of "bro”, shortening of brother) which takes shape above all in an infinity of English roots which become verbs declined following the first conjugation (friendzone, killare, matchare, nerdare, shottare, startare, streammare).
The birth of a Newspeak: neither Italian nor English
These neoformations they no longer belong nor in Italian (of which they break the historical phonological and orthographic norms) nor in English, but they constitute a Newspeak that seems to lean toward a hybrid called Ital- lish. In fact, even the first ones are starting to appear mixed language utterances.
Kevin DeVecchis (“As young people say. The perception of youth language on the net”) notes the insertion of fixed expressions “usually quotes from songs, films, television programs and videos”, such as fight me, prove me I'm wrong, what a time to be alive) “or even verbal syntagms such as e.g. is over 'is finished', which is joined to different subjects.”
To contribute to this very strong anglicization there is then the major knowledge of the English language compared to previous generations, notes the scholar.
English, which was once a choice, has for years become a requirement in school and English-based monolingualism is supported by school curricula across Europe, while projects born under the banner of plurilingualism to encourage language learning , in the plural, have in fact transformed into teaching tools in English only, from Erasmus to CLIL (not surprisingly an acronym for Content and Language Integrated Learning).
The result is that if young Italians and Spaniards once communicated in their respective languages, which have a high degree of intercomprehensibility, today they tend to do so in English.
Anglicisation of Italian
It must be said that what happens in a very evident way in the new youth language fits into amore general anglicization, a social phenomenon that affects Italian in its entirety.
According to the dictionary brands, the number of anglicisms not adapted is more than doubled over the past thirty years. The first electronic dictionary that allowed automatic searches, the Devoted Oli of 1990, recorded 1.600 raw anglicisms, while in the 2020 edition there are more than 4.000. The first version of the Zingarelli digital, in 1995, included just over 1.800 and today there are more than 3.000, but the gap between the two vocabularies is only due to the different classification criteria: Devoto Oli tends to make each locution a separate lemma, while the Zingarelli tends to record them within the mother word, so marketing mix — for example — is found under the main heading marketing and is not counted by automatic searches. But refining the research, the numbers and voices of the two works are not very different from each other.
From the quantification of the neologisms of the new Millennium, in both dictionaries it emerges that more than half of the new words are in raw English or in any case come from English.
E Luca Serieanni (Il lexicon, vol. 2 of the Le parole dell'italiano series, Rcs Corriere della Sera, Milan 6/1/2020, pp. 53–54) noted that analyzing the Italian neologisms, the absence of primitive words stands out: they are all derived or compounded.
What is new is expressed in English: the stagnation of juvenile language, therefore, goes hand in hand with that of "official" Italian and the changes in juvenile language shouldn't surprise, they are just the mirror of a much wider phenomenon.
Technology and language
In the sixties Pier Paolo Pasolini, in greeting the linguistic unification of our country, noted with acumen that the new Italian was no longer the literary one, but the technological one that came above all from the North.
Today, however, technology and the language of work are increasingly expressed with terminology and concepts in English and more generally also the language of our ruling class (from science to training, from politics to journalism, from culture to sport). it distinguishes itself, identifies itself and elevates itself through anglicisms, with the same sociolinguistic mechanisms that mark juvenile anglophilia.
Even Tullio DeMauro, in 2016, revised its judgments that opposed the alarm of the "Morbus anglicus" of Arrigo Castellani, realizing that we are now in the presence of one “tsunami anglicus” which is worldwide, even if in Italy it is particularly strong.
A cultural paradigm shift
If the “Halloween natives” have been shaped by the soft power of movies, TV series, comics or video games set in a society that has been internalized and which they naturally emulate, their expressive anglophilia is affected by this context.
But that doesn't just apply to i millennial(s) , gen Z, also boomers , generation X they trained on overseas models and resort to jobs act, family days, lockdowns or green passes.
And the fact that to identify ourselves as generations we now use categories conceived in the USA (once we spoke, for example, of the XNUMXs and the XNUMXs were those of the ebb) and we express them preferably or only in their language is very significant for understanding the change of current cultural paradigm.
Antonio Zoppetti, graduated in philosophy, in 1993 he edited the CD-ROM transfer of the first digital dictionary on the market in Italy: the Devoto Oli. On the interference of English he has published: "L'Eticario, Dictionary of Italian alternatives to 1800 English words (Franco Cesati 2018)"; “Let's say it in Italian. The abuses of English in the lexicon of Italy and paste (Hoepli 2017)”.
An article on useless anglicisms… full of useless anglicisms.