From 1986 to 1989, Paninaro was the best selling comic magazine in Italy.Beside being a comic magazine, it represented also the link between identityand language in the second half of the 1980s. For the Italian youth, Paninaroserved as model of behaviour showing them how to talk, what to wear, how tolive. The language used in Paninaro was considered a sub-standard. The aimof this paper is to show how the paninaro’s language showed all thecharacteristics that later entered the Italian language from the1990s onward
