Anglicisms and Vocabulary Dynamics in the Romanian Online Communication

Sa？etak The development of technological devices and the expansion of electronic communication and social media channels in the last few years has had a significant impact on how people communicate, especially in online written communication, particularly among young people, regardless of their nationality. Moreover, we can currently refer to our society as to a global society in which English prevails as a tool for communication and interaction between speakers of different languages particularly in the cyber space. Since English is the language of global communication, English loanwords constitute a linguistic and socio-cultural phenomenon. The creation and the development of this phenomenon is mainly owed to advances in electronic communication and technology, since the usage of English is widely spread from the IT to the economic and sociocultural fields. The influence of English on the Romanian language has been the object of numerous studies. In order to fill in a gap in the analysis of anglicisms in Romanian, the objective of this paper is to analyse the influence of English in the online communication between young people in Romania. Particular focus is given to a number of aspects of the vocabulary dynamics of Romanian: the position, the form and the functions of anglicisms, from a lexical and semantic perspective. Examples from the following sources will be illustrated and discussed: fashion articles from youth online publications, recordings of video blogs and podcasts as well as YouTube videos