ITALIANO NEL NUOVO MILLENNIO: UN'ANALISI DELL'ITALIANO SU FACEBOOK

Abstract

It has been over a decade since the creation of Facebook and there are other virtual places where people can engage in computer mediated communication (CMC) in public while also having private conversations with either friends or strangers. Today, more than two decades since the advent of the internet, these new forums of expression have not been linguistically investigated in Italian academia. In this research a corpus collected from conversations on Facebook from selected native speakers of Italian will be analyzed to research which current trends have emerged in Italian language use in such an informal context.

This thesis analyzes the variety of Italian used on Facebook tracing its evolution from a literary language to one used in mass media. The influence of the “language of the youth” will be examined and its own influence on the “language of the web” will be clarified. The quantitative analysis of the corpus in the areas of lexicon, morphology and syntax reveals that the so called “interference” of English on the Italian vocabulary is less important than the influence of the “language of the youth” and the reemergence of the regional dialects at least in the area of the lexicon. In the areas of morphology and syntax there are deviations from the standard in the use of punctuation and in the efforts to imitate the spoken word.

Ultimately, from the analysis it emerges that the language used in the corpus is in fact a variety of informal Italian that has clear roots in the “language of youth” and other substandard variations that were typically spoken while also having integrated some features of the language of text messaging. This is a language that can be placed on a clear temporal continuum with other substandard variations and therefore cannot be isolated as a separate entity in the way the supporters of the theory of “language of the web” propose.