Pragmatic Reality of Finglish (in Twitter Social Network)

Abstract

Being a global language English undergoes certain changes and acquires different varieties known as pre-pidgin forms when English serves as a lexificator language. The number of these “Worlds Englishes” is constantly growing and changing, but on the other hand, based on some personal perceptions, we could notice certain reluctance among linguists to examine and describe the language fusions of such kind. The author analyses the concept of World Englishes noting that there is no unity among both Russian and Western linguists towards the terminology and types of World Englishes. Another review covers the mixture of English and Finnish under question that was formed in the US. Special attention is paid to the pshyco-linguistic theories explaining the emergence of both types of pre-pidgins. The author used social network Twitter with “Finglish” as a hash tag as the material for the study. To give a certain estimate to the pragmatic side of it it also carried out a contextual analysis of all the twits with the respective hash tag. The research interest is to specify the connotation, i. e. pragmatic aspect of it that micro context of a twit post might reveal. Overall, we have analyzed 398 twit inscriptions dated from 2009 until 2018. The paper describes three types of pragmatic attitudes to Finglish: neutral (which is typical to the code switching), irony and negative. It is almost impossible to predict whether this pre-pidgin form will develop further or would be restricted (with variable degree of frequency) by social networks and/or informal aural communication, but what is certain is that this form of the language takes place at present and thus linguists cannot ignore it.