The role and function of English borrowings in Italian youth podcasts

This paper illustrates a sample of anglicisms extracted from a corpus of podcasts addressed to adolescents and young people. One of the sources is the Italian radio Radioimmaginaria, which is produced and managed by teenagers and the other is an independent podcast called Facciamolo, focussed on sex and psychological issues related to the world of youth. The analysis of the data has shown that the majority of loanwords are non-adapted (83%). Adaptation is mainly applied to verbs, in compliance with the Italian verb system, and nouns can be creatively modified according to Italian morphological and lexical patterns. Particular attention is paid to the areas of interest in which anglicisms are used and to English-induced neologisms that are not yet recorded by Italian dictionaries, their meaning and context of use. The analysis confirms that the youth language exploits the power of anglicisms to talk about things and values that are shared by their own speech community and at the same time by the international community that offers the strongest cultural model to their generation.