Abstract:
In the age of technological advances, languages experience imminent variations at higher
rates due to frequent digital communication on the Internet. Social media platforms, messengers
have allowed people to communicate online in both written and spoken forms. They became new
realities of interpersonal communication, new sources of entertainment and display of linguistic
data. When COVID-19 restrictions were applied, many people were quarantined in their homes.
This allowed people to use all social media platforms, where a great number of people spent a
significant amount of time interacting with various content. This is when Tik-Tok, a
video-sharing platform, gained instant popularity among people. Tik-Tok allowed speakers of
different languages to communicate with each other through sharing video-content that required
less of spoken language, but more of written language. Consequently, it allowed language
contact in a digital space. As a result, English speaking Tik-Tok had a major influence on the
Russian language used on social media. Many young people started acquiring new slang words
and borrowings from English. It was further used in the written language and even adapted into
Russian as Russian slang words. Since Tik-Tok is developing it would allow more language
contact, which will possibly result in more variations of modern Russian language. I use Tik-Tok
daily, and have acquired new vocabulary by using it. This made me interested in studying
linguistic features of the platform, mainly language contact.