NEW SOCIO-POLITICAL LOANWORDS IN INTERNET-MEDIA: VARIANTS IN SYNCHRONY

Abstract

The article analyzes qualitative and quantitative peculiarities of new socio-political loanwords variants in the Ukrainian language. It sheds the light onto reasons of phonemic and graphic variations of borrowings and their use in Ukrainian internet media in 2013–2018.Since socio-political vocabulary partly represents phenomena from foreign countries, it is exposed to continuous flow of borrowings. Loanwords are more likely to have variants and need to be harmonized with the literary norms of Ukrainian. We recorded more than 50 new borrowed units, and more than 30% of them function in parallel forms. The main reason of the variation is non-regulated use of numerous ways to convey unit form by means of Cyrillic alphabet and Ukrainian phonemes, especially transliteration and transcription. There are more than 10 variants of adapted lexeme Brexit which differ in letters, capitalization/non-capitalization, and use of quotation marks. Although Google Trends does not provide clear figures, the author demonstrates relative frequency of using variants in search queries by Ukrainians. In most cases, dominating variant is the one that better suits to the lingual system and should become a literary norm.Graphic variations of socio-political loanwords occur in the language of Ukrainian media when authors mechanically copy graphic peculiarities from the source language. Since English as a main source language of modern socio-political borrowings is characterized by spelling irregularities, transcription should be the only way of new loanwords customization into the Ukrainian language. At the same time, transliteration continues to be an appropriate way for international borrowings with Latin or Greek structure. Results of the research demand to address the issue of overuse new loanwords which have synonyms in the Ukrainian literary language.