HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH? - THE TREATMENT OF ANGLICISMS IN THE CONTEXT OF CROATIAN AND GERMAN

HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH? - THE TREATMENT OF ANGLICISMS IN THE CONTEXT OF CROATIAN AND GERMAN

Babić, Snježana
Gradečak-Erdeljić, Tanja

The aim of this research is to establish the relevance of the results from a survey conducted among the university students of English and German at the University of Osijek construed in order to establish the degree of awareness among the non-native users of English of how anglicisms are treated in the context of Croatian and German language systems and which are the strategies of coping with the pervasive influence of English vocabulary. Preliminary results show that English lexical borrowings from the field of IT technology are used very frequently in their communication via computers and mobile phones and the students acquire rather slowly the suggested Croatian and German equivalents and neologisms in the IT terminology. Three basic strategies of direct borrowing, phonological and morphological adaptation and neologisms will be researched by applying a questionnaire with both lexical and visual prompts for the students in order to elicit responses which will be analysed and put in the context of whether Croatian and German function as a "language of identification" or a "language of communication" (House, 2003).

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2014

3543