The language of the Italian youth on TikTok: Focus on the use of Anglicisms

In the interconnected and global society we live in, speakers from different linguistic backgrounds use English as an international lingua franca to communicate with each other. As a consequence, English is inevitably shaping and influencing other languages, including Italian. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the use of Anglicisms in Italian social media and in the language of young Italians, with a particular focus on TikTok, a new video-sharing platform that has become one of the most popular apps worldwide in just a couple of years. TikTok was chosen as the focus of this study for its popularity, for the wide range of content it offers, for its audience, which mainly consists of Gen Zers, and for the short-video format of its contents. Thanks to these features, I was able to investigate how young Italians spontaneously use Anglicisms in social media, and to what extent they incorporate them into their language. In order to conduct the research, I collected 50 Italian TikTok videos, which I then transcribed to design the target corpus, and 30 native-English TikTok videos, which I also transcribed, so as to create the English corpus. Throughout the analysis, the latter was employed as a reference corpus to compare how Anglicisms are used in Italian and in English and to investigate if there were any instances of Pseudo-Anglicisms in the Italian corpus. The analysis was conducted from both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective, as I not only investigated the number of occurrences of each Anglicism, but also collocations and lexical bundles. The results reveal that the vast majority of the Anglicisms employed in the Italian videos belong to a given specialised terminology, followed by everyday language, whereas youth slang presents the smaller number of Anglicisms. Furthermore, the findings show that non-adapted Anglicisms are far more frequent than adapted ones, and that Pseudo-Anglicisms are very uncommon. The dissertation concludes by summarising the findings and offering a broad interpretation of the results.