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Part II borrowing as the process of two language systems, it’s means of reproduction in the ukrainian language

In Part I "Borrowing as a process of two language systems, its means of reproduction in the Ukrainian language" I consider the relevance of the foreign borrowings in the Ukrainian vocabulary, its impact on different spheres of life and history, causes of the penetration of borrowings from English into Ukrainian, and their influence and usage in the Ukrainian youth slang In the modern Ukrainian language borrowings from other, non-Slavic languages are mostly used. They became members of the Ukrainian language from different sources. It contributed to the economic, political and cultural relationships of the Ukrainian people, the peoples of West and East, as the result of which many borrowings are used in the Ukrainian language, that brought the rules of its phonetics and grammar, adapted to the Ukrainian word formation rules and semantic systems.

2.1. The Recent Changes in the Ukrainian Language

Apart from the inherent characteristics of the Ukrainian language and creative activity of the people whom this language belongs to, there has been a long process of establishing its full expressive potential.

The Ukrainian language has a rich vocabulary, quite differentiated with regard to the spheres of usage and functional characteristics. At the same time, it has a developed terminology to meets the needs of today’s science and technology.

Recently the expanding of the Ukrainian language has been widely observed in the Ukrainian society. But this process is being accompanied by some phenomena: the liberalization of norms and the decrease of the language standards. In other words, quality is unable to catch up with the quantity in this case. It would have been natural if at least some efforts had been taken to preserve the level it had reached during the previous level of development. Quite a lot of people feel uneasy because of the mass saturation of the language with different borrowings. The situation has been worsened by the fact that many of them have equivalents in the Ukrainian language: briefing (брифінг) – зустріч; dividend (дивіденд) – прибуток; know-how (ноу-хау) - знаю як. Each nation’s language functions and develops in the context of other languages and under the influence of this context. All nations and countries keep contributing to the mutual scientific, political and economic relations. This fact is the easiest explanation why all the efforts for the artificial isolation of a language are meaningless and contradictory. National selfhood is determined not only by the number of specific words, emphasizes that the national peculiarity of a language is formed by numerous standard components, which are fundamentally combined into one functional system and serve as the means of communication and one of the nation’s factors. It is only the specific character of this functional system that reveals the language durability.

The mutual enrichment of the languages is one of the ways that the languages of the world evolve. The linguistic mechanisms of this interaction during the different periods of the language history might have various peculiarities. The borrowings do not always benefit the language development. Some communication spheres demand the implementation of serious regulatory activities, such as the information sector, especially advertising, where we can witness the foreign words’ “aggression” [АЖНЮК; p. 50]. These phenomena have nothing to do with the enrichment. Enrichment is a process when the verbal symbol of one language covers the conception field of the mother tongue, creating a new meaning or enlarging the connotation of an existing word.

Thus we can observe a common phenomenon, which is the logical consequence of the situation mentioned above. Some people fall under the influence of fashion and begin following what they have heard on TV or over the radio, though they used to speak the standard Ukrainian language, familiar since their childhood.

During the past decade, the Ukrainian language life has witnessed some changes. They are connected with the declaration of the independence on the one hand and the increasing participation of the country in the globalization processes on the other. The growing interest of Ukrainian citizens in the latest information technologies, first and foremost the Internet, made the country open to external influence in the socio-political, intellectual and cultural spheres of life, as well as with regard to moral aspects and daily life. The language has not remained immune to this process.

Decolonization and globalization are phenomena different in kind, opposed to each other in many aspects. Decolonization is connected with the establishment of the national identity. In the sphere of communication at least three problems should be solved: 1) the increase of the Ukrainian language native speakers; 2) its expansion in the spheres where it is little represented; 3) language purification (phonetics, grammar, vocabulary) of the borrowings, especially its derussification [1; p. 48].

Globalization mostly includes the information openness, thus the presence of foreign participants in the communicative process is expected [25; p. 41]. Its nature is transnational, even cosmopolitan. Its inevitable partner in many countries is bi- or multilingualism. Information intervention is realized with the help of such means as radio and television, newspapers, the Internet, information maintenance of the consuming market. The effects of globalization have become noticeable in the educational sphere, due to the English language classes and Internet addiction. Recently we have witnessed a great number of distance educational programs, which are impossible to be used without sufficient knowledge of English. At the same time a number of testing programs such as GRE, TOEFL, IELTS have become an essential part of the educational process, impossible to deal with without mastering the language at the proper level. Globalization stresses the struggle for the domination in the information space. It is not only about the media corporations’ rivalry, but that of national languages as well. The functional niche of the Russian language in Ukraine has been replaced not only by Ukrainian, but by English as well, the language has become an active participant in the commodity exchange, at the same time being a commodity itself. It is easy to see from the examples of audio-, video- output, computer games, concert activity of musicians, and publication activity[5; p. 51].