FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

My favourite neologism is “girl math”. It comes from English and has been borrowed in Italian, especially starting from 2023, through online uses. It is a compound of “girl” and “math”, but the first member is getting more and more dereferentialised. It stands for a day of reasoning typically associated with women, but not exclusively so, and it implies a reasoning that takes into consideration the weight of variabile different from material ones, like money, considering also the emotional value of experiences.

I am a PhD student at the University of Salerno, working on linguistic education and online environments. I have worked on social media language, focusing in particular on contact-induced constructionalization from English into Italian (e.g., ‘X (non) sta X-ando’, ‘non X che V’), creative uses involving non-standard superlatives in Italian (‘V-issimo’), and gendered loan neologisms (e.g., girl math, girls’ girl, girl dinner, girlie).