MORPHOLOGICAL ADAPTATIONS OF SLANG WORDS BORROWED FROM ENGLISH INTO RUSSIAN: A CASE STUDY OF TIK-TOK

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.