English-Russian Language Interference in Online Communication: Lexical and Grammatical Aspects

The present study focuses on Russian-English language interference in the context of strengthening English as the global language of online communication.

The relevance of the research stems from the demand in scientific research on the dynamics of language contact between Russian and English in online-communication, as well as on linguistic tendencies in the system of modern Russian language. The research aims to identify and analyze lexical and grammatical aspects in Russian-English language interference in online-communication. The research methods were chosen in accordance with the aim, tasks and nature of the study: continuous sampling, complex analysis of extralinguistic factors of language interference, comparative analysis. The study shows that text-messages and posts in online-communication tend to resemble spoken language, which indicates that Internet users are seeking to close the gap between online and offline communication. It demonstrates that internet users implement foreign language units to dissociate from emotionally loaded utterances as well as to express a specific grammatical or lexical semantic unit not found in their native language. To facilitate sentences one also uses syntax models which are foreign for the native language. The consequences of language interference are rather specific. The studied material shows that interference units are used repeatedly to a large extent. This implies that such language units, on the one hand, tend to be part of the speaker’s individual vocabulary and, on the other hand, they may become linguistic norm. The research argues that Russian has a tendency to move towards more analytic language paradigms, predominantly through involuntary reduction of the case system in the spoken language.

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