Anglicisms in the language of economics and finance: The case of Bitcoin in the Italian press.

Due to the ever-growing frequency of international exchanges, English financial language for special purposes (LSP) tends to increasingly enter other languages. Also financial and economic Italian is characterised by a great number of anglicisms, which tend to replace previous Italian equivalents. The present study aims to analyse and classify the major English economic-financial loans in the language of the Italian press about Bitcoin. After a brief but detailed overview of the economic and financial discourse, the linguistic phenomenon of anglicisms and the development of cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin, a corpus-driven analysis is carried out. During this practical phase, two comparable corpora – an Italian and an English one – are created through the freeware program AntConc. Both corpora are made of economic and financial journal articles from Il Sole 24 Ore and Wall Street Italia, for the Italian corpus, and Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal for the English one. The analysis is divided into two different stages. The first one consists of an intra-linguistic analysis which examines the economic-financial anglicisms occurring in Italian and English expert-toexpert and expert-to-layperson communication from both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective. The most frequent anglicisms in the Italian corpus are individually analysed by providing their specific definition, grammatical category, possible spelling variations, subfield, translation, the main collocations, and context through the presence or lack of notes and glosses. The second phase is a comparative analysis developed at an interlingual level in order to explore the differences in the number, grammatical category, form, and use of the terms in English and Italian.