The stylistics of recontextualization in selected American, Italian and Polish gaming videos on YouTube

One striking aspect of the popular video sharing platform YouTube is that it appears to allow for a great number of repetitive content to co-exist and still enjoy a high viewer count. The author of the present article, by looking at selected gaming videos on YouTube in three languages, namely American English, Italian and Polish, attempts to demonstrate that this repetitiveness is in fact creative recontextualization which brings into prominence the personality of the YouTuber, their idiolect included. While the videos share a number of similarities at the linguistic and extralinguistic level across the three cultures of interest, the creation of what the author calls personal storylines is the most salient distinguishing factor in the videos of particular vloggers. The present article will contribute to the developing area of research dedicated to spoken language on the Internet, and will constitute one of the few attempts, to date, to examine the phenomenon in three different languages and across three different cultures