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The Influence of English on the Language of Croatian Influencers on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok Social Media : master's thesisEna Cilar, 2023, master's thesis
Abstract: The rapid spread of the English language, which is frequently referred to as a lingua franca, has had a significant impact on other languages and the peculiar language of computer-mediated communication. What is more, the Internet, social media and digital influencers are the key agents of both language change and changes in the modern society. Due to the globally growing popularity of social media influencers, the purpose of this thesis is to explore the ways in which their language use is affected by the globality of English, with a focus on Croatian influencers. Therefore, data for this paper are drawn from altogether 270 social media posts published by the eight most successful Croatian influencers on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. The research methods include linguistic, thematic and content analysis. The results reveal that the use of ‘ad hoc loanwords’ and intra-sentential code-switching are more common among Croatian influencers in comparison with outdated Anglicisms and inter-sentential code-switching. While the most frequently used loanwords among Croatian influencers belong to the categories of cyberculture and popular culture, the use of loanwords belonging to particular semantic fields is not strongly related to their thematic content categories. The importance and originality of this thesis are that it is the first study to provide new insights into the language use of Croatian influencers in relation with English as a global and leading online language. However, due to practical constraints, it is limited in terms of the research sample size and generalizability, which offers implications for further research.
Keywords: English as a global language, influence of English on Croatian, Croatian social media influencers, computer-mediated communication, loanwords, code-switching
Published in DKUM: 04.01.2024; Views: 544; Downloads: 51
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