L’identità digitale nella società contemporanea – l’analisi sociolinguistica dei nickname usati sulle chat line italiane

This paper is an attempt to examine what the language function is in the modern society, the society of virtual relations, with a focus on nicknames used on Italian chat lines. There are some studies on the Internet phenomenon and its peculiarity, however in human science they mostly refer to the social and psychological aspects. Still there are little papers in the field of linguistics, especially on the Italian language used in Internet. It is undeniable that the contemporary science is associated with many different fields, so taking into consideration their interdisciplinary character the present study is to investigate the social and linguistic aspects of how the virtual reality influences language, perception and social relations. We will concentrate on the users’ identities and their lexical representation in Italian.