Baština (Jan 2020)
The status of new English loanwords in the language of secondary school students
Abstract
Language change is an important characteristic of any language, and its manifestations are most obvious in the structure and content of the lexicon. The lexicon of the Serbian language has been changing not only as a result of various word formation processes, but also under the influence of the process of borrowing, particularly from the English language, nowadays a dominant global language which permeates all areas of human activity. English loanwords play a significant role in the change of the lexicon of the Serbian language, and are being adopted and used in everyday oral and written communication, particularly by younger people, who are more open to accept these changes. This paper investigates the status of some English loanwords among secondary school students, and how these words affect their lexicon. The research focuses on the analysis of students' answers to the questions containing a corpus of selected loanwords taken from the dictionary 'Rečnik novijih anglicizama' (Vasić et al., 2001), whose aim is to determine which English loanwords have already been assimilated and perceived as words of domestic origin, and which words are still felt as foreign by the students. This paper also investigates semantic characteristics of these loanwords, and how the students use them and understand their original meaning. The analysis of the answers casts a deeper insight into the way loanwords are used in the target language the longer they stay therein.
