Gli anglicismi nella comunicazione politica su Twitter

This work investigates the use of anglicisisms in Italian political communication as developed in the microblogging website Twitter. After having briefly outlined a theoretical framework, referring to grounded studies in the field of language contact and language imperialism, we present an analysis which is divided into three main parts. The first part presents some quantitative results and evaluates the incidence of anglicisisms on the entire corpus we have gathered, specifying their grammatical and semantic characteristics: the general incidence of 1,13% and a clear prevalence of nouns and adjectives confirm the trends already observed in many previous studies about the use of anglicisisms in the Italian language. The second part focuses on neologisms, which play a rather significant role: more than 30% of English loans is represented by words that have not been included in the most recent Italian dictionaries (2014), proving how these terms can rapidly enter everyday language without having achieved any official acknowledgement or gone through a standardization process. Finally, in the third part we try to identify some peculiar and innovative traits in the use of anglicisisms: for instance, there is a number of cases in which they are used to express key elements of political communication as slogans, titles and announcements, which also confirms the fact that Italian speakers attribute a highly stylistic and pragmatic value to English loans. Novelty, freshness and cosmopolitanism are then often considered to be more important than other aspects of communication, namely transparency and the possibility for the addressee to fully understand the message.