Bulgarian-English Code-switching in Internet Forum Communication: The BG-mamma Case

Abstract

Abstract The aim of the paper is to introduce the author's observations on the influence that English has on the Bulgarian forum "Netspeak" for women living in the USA. The collected data for the investigation are excerpted from a Bulgarian forum platform. The emphasis is on code-switching, one of the main topics in sociolinguistics; as well as on the interlanguage, which is a result of the penetration of some elements from English into the first language of communicators. The orthography may also be influenced as in Bulgaria the Cyrillic alphabet is used. The informal situation is a prerequisite for the mixed style use, especially in vocabulary. Different topics have been observed and discussed by users in the forum: the choice of baby accessories; baggage loss in airports; child diseases, child physical and mental development, etc. The investigated forum discussion includes 52,020 lexical items. Excerpted English words are few - only 1.5%. Most of them are nouns because of their easy grammatical adaptation. The verb group is not affected so noticeably. The Bulgarian verbal system is very complicated and English verbs used in Bulgarian context are grammatically adapted. There are some exceptions when people use ready-made constructions like idioms and phrasal verbs.