Electronic Italian on Social Media (Facebook 2022)

Typing using a keyboard, whether from mobile or computer, has become a frequent daily habit in order to communicate with others or comment on some news. In electronic writing, the user tries to deliver a message in a concise and quick way, therefore he relies on the usage of linguistic features. This paper discusses some of the linguistic features of Italian electronic writing of the on Facebook. It is divided into two main parts: a theoretical part that deals with some definitions provided by linguists in the field of sociolinguistics related to explaining the difference between the linguistic features of both modes of written Italian, Italian in electronic writing and remote Italian in order to elaborate on the differences, then the different linguistic features of the articles that were selected for analysis from the written, syntactic and lexical aspects, as well as the use of punctuation marks. The research showed some results, including the linguistic aspects related to writing and spelling, such as repetition of some letters, deleting some letters to abbreviate the word, in addition to typing errors on the keyboard. Aspects related to parsing include the user's preference for short sentences over long sentences. In terms of lexical research, it turned out that users preferred to mix phrases with foreign words – especially English – and use abbreviations. As for punctuation marks, there was a frequent use of exclamation marks and the deletion of space between words. Regarding synthetic morphology, the research has shown some wrong uses of auxiliary actions. Finally, non-verbal comments, such as captioning with pictures or emojis. The paper ends with the conclusion and references.