Memetica. La lingua franca giovanile del XXI secolo

In this article, we discuss the digital meme, a new textual genre ‘native’ to the Internet. Our aim is to illustrate its salient linguistic and visual features by means of a quantitative and qualitative corpus analysis. The meme is a multimodal text whose interpretation must necessarily take into account the text-image relationship. Specifically, it represents a creative and innovative cultural product of the semiotic juvenile universe linked to the modern collective and inclusive culture. Our study proposes to consider the multimodal written communication achieved through memes as a youth lingua franca, i.e. a written youth variety which manifests elements of continuity and discontinuity with the youth varieties of previous decades.