IMPACT OF ENGLISH ON SERBIAN AT LEXEME LEVEL IN COMMUNICATION ON SOCIAL NETWORKING WEBSITE FACEBOOK − A CASE STUDY

Abstract

The paper is concerned with the influence of the English language on the Serbian language at lexeme level in communication on the social networking website Facebook. This quantitative research was accomplished within the scope of contact linguistics and the corpus consisted of 144 statements within 10 different Facebook profiles from which comments on pictures and videos, as well as wall posts and comments were downloaded. Relying on Tvrtko Prćić's semantic-pragmatic research (2005), the English loanwords were analysed from two different points of view: (1) according to their type – establishing a dichotomy between obvious and raw loanwords; and (2) according to their justification of use – establishing a dichotomy between justified and unjustified loanwords. Since personal and occasional use of English loanwords within Serbian sentences is an example of status-driven use, the statements illustrating zero adaptation phenomenon are more frequently used compared to the arbitrary transcription of the original (25 examples, out of total 32) fall into ziro adaptation category. The category of justified English loanwords consists of 50 examples, out of total 116 (43.10%), while unjustified loanwords comprise 56.89% of the corpus. Serbian language manuals do not provide detailed standardization where English loanword orthography is concerned due to the fact that the speed at which the loanwords enter the receiving language exceeds the speed at which the language norm is established. The obvious and raw loanword category comprise 88.79% and 12.06% of corpus, respectively. It could be concluded that the users of this social networking website follow the basic transcription rules concerning the standard norm of the Serbian language.