Da "aggro" a "zergare". Lingua e lessico del gaming italiano

Abstract

This study focuses on the language of the Italian gaming world by analysing its structures and linguistic features. It is divided into three parts: the first chapter is a general overview of the attitudes and trends about gaming and its evolution in Italy; in the second chapter a wordlist has been built up ad hoc in order to collect and categorise the most popular words in the Italian language of gaming; the third part is an analysis of the above-mentioned language and its users, known as gamers, resulting in the massive presence of anglicisms in the whole corpus. Firstly, some statistical comparisons prove that in the last decades gaming has become a real worldwide phenomenon, even though data collections conducted by research institutes cannot give an actual and useful estimate of the number of gaming language speakers. Therefore, this study is meant to analyse mostly PC gamers category, since they massively use the gaming language into their chats. The dictionary has been composed by referring to more than 120 online sources like Wikipedia, Treccani, Dizionario del Corriere, several fan blogs and websites. The final part is a review from a grammatical and linguistic viewpoint and gives some reasons why the gaming language has developed. Among these, three main dimensions are discussed: diffusion, immediacy and personal user choice. The last chapter is an attempt to provide an anthropological analysis of the users' choices by contextualising the gamers community into an unreal coexisting world, that is the cyberspace.