Il lessico dei MMORPG. Glossario commentato dei tecnicismi delle comunità videoludiche

The paper makes some remarks about the language variety spoken and written in online gaming communities through a quantitative analysis of the lexicon composition, subsequently discussing the role of common words, toponyms, and anglicisms. Furthermore, the study highlights the extension of the technical terminology and the importance of the jargon: the technical terminology is needed to distinctly denote a large group of complex and exclusive referents, while the role of jargon words is to define and preserve the group identity; the combination of these two elements makes texts written by gamers hard to understand, and it forces new members of a community to follow a learning process based on prolonged social interactions. The broadest part of the article consists of a glossary that gathers a selection of unique terms extracted from Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games chats. Each entry contains information about the meaning of the associated word, its formation, its distribution and, in some cases, a list of its variants and synonyms. The glossary exhibits a large amount of loanwords, both integrated and non–integrated, and calques, whereas derivatives and compound words are rare. However, the more common word–formation processes are the verbalization of English nouns and the contraction of words that causes a considerable linguistic variation.