Abstract

The paper examines some aspects of youth language in Rome and presents the data of a dialect micro-survey carried out with fifteen university students born and raised in Rome, attending the bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Roma Tre University, aged between 19 and 29. All participants were given a questionnaire with fifty words of youth language from the early 2000s, and they were asked to indicate whether or not they knew the meaning of these words. The aim of the study is to investigate the survival or decline of youth language words over a twenty-year period. This is a representative time period to assess change in youth language, notoriously volatile and more exposed to changes and updates.