IMPACT OF ENGLISH ON SERBIAN ORTOGRAPHY, LEXIS AND GRAMMAR ON FACEBOOK

Abstract

This paper deals with the influences of the English language on Serbian on Facebook, today–s most popular social site with almost 1,5 million users from Serbia. The corpus collected on this site was analysed on 3 levels: orthographic, lexical and grammatical. The analysis showed that the lexical level was most heavily influenced by the English language, which is a typical outcome of almost any contact between languages. However, the other two levels showed the influences of English in certain domains as well, which goes to say that the contact between these two languages has surpassed the typical indirect language contact. Further hybridisation of Serbian seems inevitable, and the best possible outcome to be expected is that the hybrid language will continue to exist as a sort of jargon, mostly limited to youger, bilingual generations.