Anglicisms in Czech

Vaisanen, Mikko (2010) Anglicisms in Czech. MPhil(R) thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

Anglicisms are becoming more widespread in many world languages, Czech being no exception to this. The Czech language has been exposed openly to the Western influences since the fall of Communism and the development in modern technology and the prevailing general trends have caused a flood of English loanwords to enter the language. The aim of this research was to see how these new English loanwords and influences have affected the Czech language and to see if it would be possible to find any variation between the language usage of different generations or the genders. Also various topics such as hi-tech and sports were studied to see if there would be differences in the amount of loanwords between them. To get the most up-to-date picture of these loanwords in the Czech language, four different newspapers were researched and then based on these findings a questionnaire was drawn. The questionnaire had two parts, the first consisting of word pairs in which one of the words was a domestic word and the other a loanword. The point in here was to see how people would react to the different types of loanwords. The second part of the questionnaire required the respondents to compose a short piece of writing in Czech. The idea behind this was to see if such a short piece of writing would include many loanwords or whether they really only come to play when one needs to add flavour, for example when writing a longer newspaper article. The results revealed that the younger generations are more likely to accept new loanwords than the older generations. It would seem that the young people have a better knowledge of the new loanwords and their original forms due to their interests in modern technology and therefore they are also more unwilling to accept the Czechified forms of these words. There were no big differences found in the language usage between the genders. The volume of loanwords varied hugely between the topics, the terminology around hi-tech having the largest amount of loanwords.

• Item Type: Thesis (MPhil(R))
• Qualification Level: Masters
• Keywords: Anglicisms. Czech language. Loanwords.
• Subjects: P Language and Literature > PG Slavic, Baltic, Albanian languages and literature
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Modern Languages and Cultures > Slavonic Studies
• Supervisor's Name: Culik, Dr. Jan
• Date of Award: 2010
• Depositing User: Mr Mikko Tapio Johannes Vaisanen
• Unique ID: glathesis:2010-1868
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 12 Jul 2010
• Last Modified: 10 Dec 2012 13:47
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/1868