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.