Anglicisms in the Bosnian-Herzegovinian context

Languages have a natural tendency to evolve, change and mirror the new cultural/socioeconomic trends and scientific and technological advancements. A part and parcel of this fluidity is incorporation and/or adaptation of a number of foreign words. Due to multiple reasons, a language that seems to be the source of a vast number of borrowed words in different languages is English. Thus, Bosnian has been impacted in a similar way, resulting in a very noticable use of English loanwords, i.e. anglicisms among the Bosnian population.Although the presence of Anglicisms in certain specialized areas in scientific and technical domains in the Bosnian language has been examined before, prior research lacks a sociolinguistic orientation. To this date, there has been no study that examined the relationship between the usage of Anglicisms and the level of understanding of both a written form and its meaning in the Bosnian language among the youth in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In order to gain a deeper look into the topic, the present work investigates Bosnian & Herzegovinian high school students’ usage and knowledge of contemporary Anglicisms.