Innovative written expression of youth in Serbia

Abstract

When we refer to the language of a particular nation, we need to take into account the modern trends of globalization as well as the urge to preserve the cultural identity and language. With the appearance of the social networks, followed by an increase in frequency of communication on the networks, there arise anglicisms and other abbreviated words in writing, which are typical amongst younger generations. The language used on the social media illustrates to a great extent the creativity of its authors, but at the same time an increase in the mistakes and irregularities in comparison to the standard language. An empirical research on this topic has been conducted during May and June 2018, with a sample of 1,148 students of undergraduate studies in the Republic of Serbia. The aim of the research was to establish to what extent they use jargon in the form of abbreviations in Serbian and English in their everyday communication on the social networks, which constitutes a part of the written language used by younger generations. It was also examined the frequency of (un)regularity in the writing of the Latin letters Dj, Dz, S, Z, C, C, while chatting, as well as the particular writing habits depending on the sources used for writing (such as paper, PC, mobile phone). The research has shown that 80% of the students in the Republic of Serbia use frequently a pen to write on a paper, hence a larger percentage of students prefer the traditional mode of writing opposed to the digital writing. The students more often use the English keyboard on their PCs, which means that they type the Latin characters in Serbian without diacritics, and 24% of the students occasionally need time to think how to write a particular letter on paper. About 21% of the students have stated that whilst writing with a pen on a piece of paper they writ? dj instead of dj; dz instead of dz. Another important fact is that over 40% of the students use ?jargon? abbreviations in Serbian whilst writing, and the percentage of the students that use the abbreviations in English constitutes to 26%, which should not be neglected in particularly since 40% frequently use anglicisms in their expression. To the knowledge of the authors of this paper, there were no researches done on this topic in the Republic of Serbia in particularly focusing on the university students.