“Ma come puoi non shipparli???? Sono canon!!!!: uno sguardo al linguaggio del fandom italiano

“How come you’re not shipping them??? They’re canon”: a look at the language of Italian fandom – The aim of this article is to examine a relatively recent phenomenon in the language of fandom, i.e. various communities of fans that form around a cultural event or artifact, such as a book, a TV show, a movie, etc. This research is located within fan studies, however, it mainly investigates the linguistic aspects of being a fan in Italian. The distinctive feature of the language of fandom as a specific variety, associated with a particular topic and activity and mediated by Internet communication tools, is a specialist lexicon, understandable only to community members. The article concentrates on loanwords from English which in the case of Italian primarily comprise the vocabulary of fandom.