Facebookland: the bizarro-linguistic world

Abstract

This article investigates the dynamics of contemporary Romanian, focusing on various linguistic structures typically used on social network sites, through which the specific content and interaction strategies are being deployed in virtual communities. The article is part of a larger project devoted to the study of linguistic impoverishment (affecting both the vocabulary and the grammatical structure of the language), social networks being only one of the areas where these “uglified” linguistic structures come from: the mass-media (both print and broadcast), advertising (outdoor, indoor, television commercials), Internet forums, corporate jargon, etc. The structures under scrutiny are mostly loan translations (i.e. calques) from English, false friends, hybrid constructions and, generally, lexical and grammatical oddities (sometimes even in the source language), which, nevertheless, due to frequent use, have entered the active vocabulary of a large category of speakers and are therefore becoming pervasive in everyday conversation. The proliferation of these ‘mongrel’ structures in common parlance is also the result of their migration, on the principle of communicating vessels, to other areas of interpersonal and public communication, that of advertising in particular. Moreover, their oddity and inappropriateness are now beginning to pass unnoticed, as more and more speakers are treating them as legitimate linguistic forms, which often end up being recorded in dictionaries. Our approach combines theoretical insights with practical solutions and the pragma-linguistic perspective with the translator’s corrective input.