The Language Between Youtubers and Boomers: Tendencies, New Words and Expressions in the Serbian Language

Abstract

This paper analyses new words and expressions used in the Serbian language. The main aims of the paper are to register and describe typical language units in young people’s speech today, then to examine the impact of technology, the Internet and new types of communication on the structure of the Serbian lexicon, and to try to identify some tendencies and processes in the contemporary Serbian language. The corpus on which the research was conducted was collected in 2019 and 2020, and it consists of 1500 utterances excerpted from online social networks, primarily Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Based on the analysis of selected new words and expressions, it was determined that young people’s speech today is changing rapidly under the influence of globalisation and the English language, especially at the lexical level. It has also been established that in latest metaphors and comparisons, new technology and the Internet are appearing more and more often in the role of source domains, as an integral part of modern culture.