English-Estonian code-copying in Estonian blogs
English-Estonian code-copying in Estonian blogs

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses English-language impact on Estonian in online blogs. The data comprises of blog entries from 15 Estonian fashion, beauty and lifestyle blogs from 2012 to February 2016. Th e corpus consists of 283 post entries (141,480 words (tokens)). Th e research showed that there are far fewer selective copies than global copies, probably because selective copies appear at more advanced stages of acquisition. Global copies are usually copied due to semantic specificity, for example fashion lexis (e.g. look, etc.). They are also copied due to their importance at the discourse level, for example god, oh well, etc. Often the English something is done by someone and have-constructions are copied, as these are already habitualized in Estonian. There is also evidence of semantic copying, which causes changes in content or usage of unusual expressions under English influence. There are also mixed copies, where global copies are used as lexical cores in copied combinational patterns (e.g. Eng. ‘epic’ used to form an adjective). A mixed copy often represents a transitory stage between a global copy and a selective copy; this might be the case in this research, as there were more mixed copies than selective ones. This might be because selective copies appear at more advanced stages of acquisition.

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