Uncritical Acceptance of the English- Language Influence on Croatian Web Portals as a Problem of Media Literacy

This paper analyses the ever increasing uncritical acceptance of the Englishlanguage influence in the language of Croatian web portals as a consequence of the acceptance of the global language of the Internet and tying to it the models of communicational prestige. The goal of the research is to list and describe the ways in which the language of Croatian web portals as part of the heterogeneous journalistic style opens up to the influence of the English language, with emphasis on daily news portals. This influence in the Croatian language as the receiving language is analysed on several linguistic levels, especially on the lexical and orthographic level, with the consequences of the non-adjustment of the loaned elements to the norms of the standard Croatian language being pointed out. Due to the fact that the language of web portals is located within a public communication of a wide user reach (especially among younger users) and due to the openness of the journalistic style to other functional styles of the Croatian language as well as the dialectic with the standard language, it is especially important to cultivate norms of the Croatian standard language in its informative genres. However, the analysis conducted shows that in the language of Croatian web portals, by “ready-made” loaning from the English language, the norms of the Croatian linguistic standard are often so broken down that a question arises whether these disruptions are becoming characteristic of web journalism, and a silently accepted way of a part of public communication? Therefore the conclusion stresses the importance of raising awareness in the authors of media content and in the users of that content about nurturing linguistic independence and taking a critical stand towards unnecessary foreign-language influences. This is where media literacy can have an important, decisive role