Abstract
Lithuanian blogs appeared ca. in the year 2000, whereas the first blogs have been in operation on the worldwide web since ca. 1994. However, the Lithuanian language used in the blogs has hardly been researched. It is obvious that in terms of quantity and quality it is a new phenomenon and it clearly influences public usage of the Lithuanian language. It would therefore be interesting to investigate its peculiarities. The article aims at analysing the most characteristic linguistic features of records randomly selected from more than one hundred of Lithuanian blogs, to define the position of blogs as a genre of electronic texts in current Lithuanian language usage and to show possibilities of their sociolinguistic research. The paper describes peculiarities of the language of the blogs. The key features include information about the author/s, purpose, content and format, and writing circumstances. The language used in blogs is compared with the language of other genres of electronic discourse, which refers to texts of interactive communication in an electronic medium such as comments on discussions on the web, text messages (SMS), instant messages, etc. The investigation concludes that the language used in blogs is more organised, i.e. their graphic and linguistic expression is similar to journalistic style rather than spoken language, the ideas are presented coherently and consistently, the text is better structured (might also be edited by author), more adapted to language standards familiar to a greater number of readers and has more linguistic self-control. The language used in blogs is not related to any region (thus it cannot be treated as a dialect) nor to any social or ethnic group (thus it cannot be treated as a sociolect). It is a type of language functioning in the electronic medium, the so-called medialect. In terms of linguistic peculiarities, blogs may be described as a genre of contemporary public unrestricted electronic usage. With a great variety of blogs, their different authors and topics, the content created directly and with no mediators, the language of the internet genre may be regarded as actual usage reflecting new trends and changes in the language. This format is open to multilayer linguistic variations; therefore, it makes a good basis for the sociolinguistic research of actual usage taking into consideration various social factors (the bloggers' age, gender, social standing, academic background, activities, interests etc.). Translated by Ernestas Lomsargis and Inesa Šeškauskienė
Downloads
Download data is not yet available.
Most read articles by the same author(s)
-
Daiva Aliūkaitė,
Miestai ir kalbos: kolektyvinė monografija, sud. M. Ramonienė
,
Lietuvių kalba: No. 5 (2011)
-
Ingrida Balčiūnienė,
Laura Simonavičienė,
Interrogative utterances in spoken Lithuanian: quantitative aspects of investigation
,
Lietuvių kalba: No. 3 (2009)
-
Miguel Villanueva Svensson,
S. Ambrazas. Būdvardžių darybos raida
,
Lietuvių kalba: No. 6 (2012)
-
Anželika Gaidienė,
Derivation of nominal verbs with the suffix -(i)auti, that belong to the categorial value ʿto be something/ someone or such as what is denoted by the base word’
,
Lietuvių kalba: No. 6 (2012)
-
Rima Bakšienė,
Dialectal speech self–evaluation and vitality: Šakiai and Jurbarkas sub-dialects in the beginning of the twenty-first century
,
Lietuvių kalba: No. 9 (2015)
-
Erika Jasionytė-Mikučionienė,
Jolanta Šinkūnienė,
The necessitive impersonal REIK(Ė)TI ‘need’: the rise of modal meaning
,
Lietuvių kalba: No. 11 (2017)
-
Anna Ruskan,
Expressing evidentiality in Lithuanian
,
Lietuvių kalba: No. 4 (2010)
-
Daiva Aliūkaitė,
Simona Amankevičiūtė,
Precedent texts in advertisements
,
Lietuvių kalba: No. 3 (2009)
-
Audronė Šolienė,
They are kind of/sort of similar: a parallel corpus-based analysis of English KIND OF and SORT OF and their Lithuanian correspondences
,
Lietuvių kalba: No. 14 (2020): Lietuvių kalba
-
Sonata Vaičiakauskienė,
The relation between the codification and actual usage of the preposition VIRŠ
,
Lietuvių kalba: No. 8 (2014)