The Americanised Slang of European Youth: Rizz, Sigma, Six-Seven — and What Survives Beneath

Walk past a lycée in Lyon, a liceo in Bologna, or an instituto in Seville, and you will hear the same four or five English monosyllables threaded through otherwise-native speech: cringe, rizz, sigma, mid, and — since the summer of 2025 — the semantically empty exclamation six-seven. The intuitive reaction is that Europe's teenagers now share a single Anglo-American vernacular, and that French, Italian and Spanish youth slang is being hollowed out from within. The reality, drawn from corpus linguistics, national language academies and sociolinguistic fieldwork, is more layered — and more interesting.

What the numbers actually show

The first thing to establish is that anglicisms in Romance-language youth speech are not a 2020s phenomenon. Corpus work on Italian, French and Spanish press and social media shows a steady, decades-long climb, but a sharp acceleration after roughly 2010, coinciding with smartphone-era platform culture. The Accademia della Crusca — Italy's 442-year-old language authority — dedicated its 2022 volume "L'italiano e i giovani. Come scusa? Non ti followo" ("Italian and the Young. Sorry? I don't followo you") to the phenomenon, concluding that massive anglicisation is now a defining characteristic of Italian youth speech, not a marginal one.

For French, the Académie française noted in its 2024 statements that roughly one in five words added to French dictionaries between 2000 and 2020 was of English origin. For Spanish, Real Academia Española collaborator Fundéu has tracked the growth via its Observatorio de Palabras and lexicographer Fernando Lázaro Carreter's earlier "Observatorio del Anglicismo". Cristina Sánchez López and others have argued that anglicism penetration has moved from journalism and advertising — its 20th-century entry points — directly into the informal register of teenagers, largely bypassing the intervening layers of standard usage.

“The interference of English is not new among young people, but today it is transmitted through the languages of social media — a strongly hybridised Italian emerges, crossed by Anglicisms, internet slang and neologisms born online.”

- Accademia della Crusca, L'italiano e i giovani (2022), ed. Annalisa Nesi

Why now: the platform hypothesis

The causal story linguists converge on has three legs. First, exposure volume: Trinity College London's 2023 report on English acquisition found that around 80% of Gen Z students say they pick up a meaningful portion of their English from TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Second, algorithmic homogenisation: unlike broadcast television, which was nationally curated, short-video feeds push viral American formats to French, Italian and Spanish teenagers within hours of a term going viral in Ohio. Third, prestige economics: English carries subcultural cachet in gaming, music production, streetwear and finance-influencer content — four spheres that dominate adolescent screen time.

The result is what the Turin-based linguist Elisa Corino and colleagues call "opaque borrowing": a term like rizz enters French, Italian or Spanish not through translation or gloss, but as an untranslated token whose meaning is triangulated from the meme it appeared in. Users under 20 typically cannot name a source register — they simply know the word "means charisma but not really", which is a hallmark of pure lexical borrowing rather than calque.

The historical layer: this has happened before

The Americanisation panic is old. Italian took gol, sport, and film in the 1930s despite Fascist attempts to italianise them (calcio, disco, and pellicola were mandated by the Reale Accademia d'Italia — only calcio survived). French absorbed weekend, parking and shopping through the 1950s-70s and, despite the 1994 loi Toubon's attempt to enforce French equivalents in advertising and workplaces, the law is now widely acknowledged to have failed at the level of vernacular speech — the Paris 2024 Olympics slogan "Made for Sharing" is regularly cited as evidence. Spanish, historically the most porous of the three thanks to trade with the anglophone Americas, absorbed fútbol, whisky and líder without institutional friction.

What differs today is speed and layer. Previous waves entered through professional or media sub-registers and diffused slowly downward. TikTok-era borrowing enters directly into the peer-to-peer register — the layer that most resists institutional influence — and does so within a viral cycle of days, not decades. This is the finding that most alarms academies: not the volume of borrowing, but the loss of the intermediate diffusion layer where languages historically domesticated foreign material.

What survives: the native vernacular is not disappearing

Against the flattening narrative, fieldwork is clear that native youth slang in France, Italy and Spain remains vigorous, and in some registers is expanding. Three mechanisms are visible.

The first is morphological absorption. Italian teenagers do not import "to ship", "to flex" or "to cringe" as English infinitives — they build native verbs on them: shippare, flexare, cringiare, conjugated regularly (io shippo, tu shippi). This is the pattern Massimo Arcangeli and others describe as "italianizzazione produttiva": the loan word is naturalised so aggressively that within a generation it is morphologically indistinguishable from a native item. French does the same with chiller, ghoster, spoiler, liker; Spanish with flipar (from "flip out"), stalkear, hypear.

The second is the persistence of high-productivity native slang. French verlan — the syllable-inversion argot documented by Louis-Jean Calvet — continues to generate new terms (reuf for frère, chelou for louche, relou for lourd) and remains inaccessible to non-native speakers, which is precisely the point. Wesh, frérot, seum, kiffer, meuf, ouf are the marks of contemporary French adolescent speech and none has an English competitor. Italian retains scialla (chill, from Roman dialect), bella (as a greeting), sbatti (hassle), tipa/o (person). Spanish preserves flipar, mazo, currar, guay, molar, chungo, petarlo — with mazo and en plan among the terms most cited in 2024–2025 fieldwork on peninsular teenagers.

The third is regional dialect reassertion. Istat's 2024 data on Italian language use showed a modest but statistically meaningful uptick in dialect (Neapolitan, Sicilian, Venetian) use among urban Gen Z, in explicit reaction to what respondents described as "linguaggio da TikTok". A similar pattern is observed in Andalusian and Catalan-influenced varieties of Spanish. Youth are not choosing between English and standard national language — they are stacking English on top of, and sometimes deliberately in tension with, regional identity markers.

Native slang currently in high circulation (2025–2026)

The following short lists reflect terms attested in multiple recent fieldwork sources for each country — not exhaustive, but representative of what teenagers use in peer contexts without registering the words as slang.

French (native and Arabic-origin, non-anglicism)

• wesh — greeting or exclamation of surprise; from Maghrebi Arabic, via banlieue rap
• frérot / reuf — "bro"; the second is verlan for frère
• seum — bitterness, being salty; from Arabic soum
• kiffer — to really like; from Arabic kif
• meuf — woman/girl; verlan of femme
• ouf — crazy, wild; verlan of fou
• chelou — shady, sketchy; verlan of louche
• relou — annoying, heavy; verlan of lourd
• bail — a "thing" or situation ("c'est quoi ce bail ?")
• cimer — thanks; verlan of merci

Italian (native giovanilese and dialect-derived)

• scialla — chill, take it easy; Roman origin, now nationwide
• bella — hi, cool, well done; multi-purpose interjection
• sbatti — hassle, effort ("che sbatti")
• sgamare — to catch out, to figure out
• tipo / tipa — guy / girl; also filler "like"
• raga — short for ragazzi, "guys"
• boh — I don't know / shrug
• zio — literally uncle, used as "bro/dude"
• una cifra — a lot, loads
• stare in fissa — to be obsessed with

Spanish (peninsular; different terms dominate in Latin America)

• flipar — to freak out / be amazed (adapted from English "flip out")
• mazo — a lot, tons ("mazo guay")
• guay — cool
• molar — to be cool, to please ("me mola")
• chungo — dodgy, difficult, bad
• currar — to work
• petarlo — to crush it, to smash it
• en plan — "like", filler phrase ("estaba en plan…")
• liarse / liarla — to mess around / cause trouble
• tío / tía — dude / girl

The genuinely global layer: what everyone is saying

A separate short list is where French, Italian and Spanish teenagers do converge on English. These are the terms that appear untranslated across all three languages in 2025–2026 fieldwork, usually spelled and pronounced approximately as in English:

• cringe — embarrassing, second-hand shame; adapted verbally as cringiare (IT), also me da cringe (ES)
• rizz — charisma, romantic pull; from "charisma" via streamer Kai Cenat, 2022
• sigma — a self-sufficient outsider archetype; ironic more often than sincere
• mid — mediocre, unimpressive
• delulu — delusional, especially about romance
• ghost / ghoster — to disappear from a conversation
• flex / flexare — to show off
• ship / shippare — to root for a couple
• random — used as adjective across all three languages
• six-seven / 6-7 — deliberately meaningless exclamation; from Skrilla's "Doot Doot (6 7)", 2024, Dictionary.com Word of the Year 2025

The six-seven case is instructive. Even Skrilla, the Philadelphia rapper who originated the phrase, told Complex it has no fixed meaning — "everybody else got their own different meaning". Dictionary.com defined it as "a burst of energy that spreads and connects people long before anyone agrees on what it actually means". This is qualitatively different from earlier anglicisms, which arrived with a stable referent (a weekend, a sport, a piece of technology). Six-seven, and to a lesser extent rizz and sigma, are borrowed as social tokens rather than lexical items — closer to a laugh or a nod than to a word.

The trajectory: three plausible futures

Predicting language change is a discipline that punishes confidence, but three trajectories are supported by the data and by comparable historical cases.

First — and most likely, based on the fate of previous waves — most current anglicisms will follow the "footprint attenuation" pattern documented by Virginia Pulcini for post-war borrowings into Italian: rapid entry, high visibility for 5–15 years, then either full naturalisation (calqued morphology, lost source-language transparency) or quiet exit. Weekend and sport survived. Baby-sitter is fading. Sigma and delulu will probably be forgotten by 2030; rizz and cringe have a stronger case for permanence because they fill lexical gaps that native competitors have not covered.

Second, the phonological and morphological identity of French, Italian and Spanish is not under credible threat at the structural level. Loan words affect the lexicon — the most porous layer of any language — not the grammar. No sociolinguist working on Romance languages currently predicts syntactic Anglicisation on a meaningful scale. What is more plausible is register erosion: the middle registers between formal standard and peer slang thinning out, with English filling the gap.

Third, the pattern is asymmetric across the three countries. French institutional resistance, however imperfect, does keep formal registers cleaner: Toubon-law enforcement in public administration is genuinely functional even if adolescent speech ignores it. Italian has weaker institutional gatekeeping and correspondingly higher penetration in journalism and business — Crusca's alarm reflects this. Spanish is somewhere between the two, buffered by the sheer size of the global hispanophone population, which dilutes any single national trend. Expect divergence to grow: French youth speech will remain the most native-slang-rich of the three, Italian the most hybridised, Spanish the most regionally fragmented.

What this means for language learners

If you are learning French, Italian or Spanish in 2026, the practical implication is that anglicism recognition is nearly free — you already know cringe, rizz, ghost — but native slang is where comprehension breaks down. A conversation in a Parisian café will contain wesh, meuf, chelou, kiffer, seum long before it contains rizz, and none of those will appear in a standard textbook. Prioritise the native layer; the English layer is a byproduct of internet exposure you already have.

The larger point, against the moral panic tone that often surrounds this topic, is that Romance-language youth slang in 2026 is not being replaced by English — it is being layered with it. Verlan, giovanilese, and jerga juvenil are all producing new native forms at roughly historical rates; they simply share airtime with a globally-viral English overlay that is visible precisely because it is homogeneous across borders. The homogeneous layer is thin. The native layers are thicker than the discourse suggests, and — for now — self-renewing.