Hybrids versus standard words in the field of technical discourse

Globalisation has been one of the most widely treated phemomena in its many aspects. It has a tremendous impact on social life and has influenced the emerging of multiple social processes. Intensive contacts between countries, the exchange of information that has been carried out mostly in English, the rapid growth of information and communication technologies has left an imprint on the culture and economics of countries, as well as in other spheres of human activity. One phenomenon that has been influenced by the process of globalisation is hybridization. This term, which has recently become wide-spread, originally comes from the domain of Natural sciences and was borrowed from foreign authors to designate the interaction of different cultures, the process of adopting features of each other’s language. Hybridization is defined as a process where separate and disparate entities or processes generate another entity or process (the hybrid), which shares certain features with each of its sources, but which is not purely compositional, acquiring new features and meanings. Hybridization in language has already occurred and has also been observed on different language, namely, speech sounds (phonetics), words (lexics) and texts. Lexics, the most rapidly changing language level, has been influenced by hybridization in the most rapid way. Hybridization in lexics could be taken both in a narrower and broader sense. Broadly speaking, hybridization is the loss of an original state of purity in vocabulary, the internationalisation of vocabulary, currently through the influence of English. This could be illustrated by the increasing number of borrowed words in academic discourse, when sometimes co-authors intentionally use international words without translating them. In a narrower sense, hybridization means forming new hybrids