English as a lingua franca in marketing: Focus on the use of anglicisms in Italian and Polish

This dissertation aims to analyse the worldwide spread and use of the English language as a lingua franca, and the different experiences of acquisition of anglicisms by the Italian and Polish languages, in particular in the semantic field of economics and marketing. The economic sector is one of those areas, in which the influence of English is felt most throughout almost all languages. This phenomenon can be traced back to the influence of the United States as an economic power, as well as to the globalisation of work marketplace and marketing, and to the spread of digital technologies that allow people and nations, who are geographically distant from each other, to be brought into contact. English has been considered the lingua franca of global communication for decades now and is usually also used by non-native speakers when they need to communicate in a language known to all. This enormous diffusion of the English language in the majority of economic sectors has as a consequence a notable linguistic interference between the speakers’ native language and English, while the number of anglicisms introduced into all languages appears to be constantly increasing, especially when it comes to terms relating to the technological and economic sphere. This occurrence has also been noticed, among many, in the Italian and Polish languages, but there are differences between the two. This work thus aims to analyse the ways in which such phenomenon occurs, the differences between these two experiences, as well as the similarities.