Language Contact in the Semantic Field of Computers and the Internet: The Newest English Lexical Loans in Polish

Nowadays more and more people are using computers and the Internet; consequently, they are continually in touch with computing terminology. The study and analysis of such terminology thus seems very important not only from the point of view of a linguist, but from one of an average computer user as well. Polish language for computers and the Internet is in a state of constant change today: new terms, mostly borrowed from English, enter the language all the time. The aim of the present paper is to analyze the origin of the newest lexical borrowings of English, many of which have not been noted in the dictionaries and/or discussed in the literature on the subject, used in Polish language for computers and the Internet. Special attention will be devoted to the morphology of such loans; among other things, special morphological processes will be discussed, such as the formation of diminutives of computer terms. The research is based on a corpus, collected and analyzed by the author of the study. The corpus comprises of texts taken from various Internet message boards devoted to computers and the Internet