New Anglicisms in Italian corpora: A comparison between CORIS and Italian Web 2016

This paper reports on new Anglicisms imported into Italian from 2010 to 2013 by searching their frequency in two Italian corpora, namely CORIS and Italian Web 2016. The sample consists of 146 non-adapted Anglicisms recorded by the Italian dictionary Zingarelli in its 2014 edition for the first time. The results show an unexpected match between these two corpora, but the much larger size of Italian Web 2016 makes it more suitable for the search of low-frequency items like Anglicisms. Furthermore, only some of the Anglicisms seem to reflect ‘general, modern and commonly used’ vocabulary; instead, most are quite rare with respect to Italian equivalents. Although many Anglicisms denote objects or concepts belonging to specialized discourse, the majority of the items observed belong to the general language. Finally, information technology and the Internet are the top borrowings fields, followed by economy, marketing and business, whereas sport is attracting fewer Anglicisms in the new millennium.