https://scienceij.com 33 Blaženović, N., Hadžiahmetović Jurida S., & Muhić, E. (2024). English word formation on the internet, SCIENCE International journal, 3(1), 33-41. doi: 10.35120/sciencej0301033b UDK: 811.111’373.611:004.738.5 1. INTRODUCTION ‘’If the Internet is a revolution, therefore, it is likely to be a linguistic revolution’’ (Crystal, 2006). The authors believe that this quote is a fairly appropriate statement for the beginning of this paper. However, the question is – why? Making a safe assumption that the Internet, as a new medium of communication, has come to a point where it almost completely dominates our lives in terms of either information enquiry or leisure activity, the key word here being ‘communication’, it would be hard to ignore the linguistic perspective while engaged in any sort of discussion about the Internet (Crystal, 2006). A very general way to think about this would perhaps be to say that a tool is produced with respect to the needs of a given trade, however, if a tool gets to a point where its use is sufficiently widespread, the very trade it was invented to serve may continue to develop in a direction which best suits the application of this tool. The Internet is, in a very literal sense, this tool and communication, therefore language itself, is the trade which has begun to be influenced by it. As for the language used on the Internet, there is no consensus about which language is to be considered as the official language of the Internet, however, the 2020 statistics (http://www. internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm) show the English language as having the most users (1.1 billion) followed by the Chinese language (888 million) and Spanish (363 million). This paper will focus strictly on the impact of Internet on the English language. 2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 2.1. WORD-FORMATION PROCESSES IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE Starting with the very notion of word-formation, it should be highlighted that it belongs to a sub- branch of linguistics called morphology which is generally defined as the study of the internal structure of word-forms (Bauer, 1983; Štekauer & Lieber, 2006). In a discussion concerning words, these parts, or building blocks in question are called morphemes (ibid.), and when properly combined, they form morphologically complex words (Plag, 2018). Morphemes can also be considered as units of form and meaning. The form of a morpheme is expressed as sound (in speech) or in letters (in writing). The term ENGLISH WORD FORMATION ON THE INTERNET Nenad Blaženović 1* , Sanel Hadžiahmetović Jurida 2 , Emir Muhić 3 1 University College CEPS, Kiseljak, Bosnia and Herzegovina; e-mail: nenadblazenovic@yahoo.com 2 University of Tuzla, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina; e-mail: sanel.h.jurida@untz.ba 3 University of Banja Luka, Faculty of Philology, Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina; e-mail: emir.muhic@flf.unibl.org Abstract: This paper examines the processes of word-formation in English on the Internet. More specifically, the present paper provides an overview of newly formed words in the context of Internet communication, their categorisation, coupled with analysis and discussion with a view to determining which (if any) word formation processes have been employed in the process of their creation. The paper attempts to capture the current trends of the English language used in popular areas of Internet interactions. The theoretical preliminaries have been divided into two distinct parts - the first half which presents general notions related to internet communication while in the second one the theory behind word-formation processes is presented in order to enable its application to the corpus originating from Internet data used in this study. As for the corpus and methodology in the study, the selected terms and expressions were extracted from various online sources (forum posts, chat logs or game screenshots) and analysed in order to determine which word-formation process they belong to. Hence the sections on abbreviations and acronyms, clips, conversions, compounds and blends, as the most productive word formation processes observed in the study. The study also looks at the popular notions of blog and tweet, as well as a particular focus on leetspeak which deals with words falling into this category but are formed via many different processes. The final section of the paper provides a summary of the findings and a conclusion to the inquiry into the nature of word-formation on the internet. Keywords: Internet communication, word-formation, blending, conversion, compounds, leetspeek Field: humanities © 2024 by the authors. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). * Corresponding author: nenadblazenovic@yahoo.com