The influence of The english language on Bcs wiTh The focus on The Business regisTer

The main objective of this corpus-based study is to shed more light on the influence of the English language on BCS with the focus on the business register. The specialized and written corpus was designed in order to examine at what levels of BCS the impact of English is most notable. The corpus was based on the texts from the news portal Klix. The results showed that the influence of English was evident at all levels of BCS, but most prominent at the lexical and syntactic level. All the phrases from the corpus were analyzed and it was found that out of 148 phrases, 113 were the examples of the influence at lexical level and the rest, 35 precisely, were the examples of the influence at the level of syntax. As for the lexical level, most borrowings are nouns, but BCS also borrows a large number of verbs, as well as adjectives. Some of these borrowings are adapted to the rules of BCS, while the others are either used in their original forms or they are used in some hybrid forms. When it comes to the syntactic level, BCS borrows inflections, modification patterns, collocations, as well as passive “by phrase”. Finally, these Anglicisms were also analyzed in terms of writing and spelling and it was found that there are many inconsistencies regarding the spelling of these borrowed words primarily due to the fact that most of them are either brand new Anglicism or they simply were not adapted to the rules of BCS. However, it was concluded that, despite the previously mentioned fact, some rules regarding the spelling of Anglicisms can still be formed.


Introduction
It is often argued that the lingua franca of today is the English language. In the Preface to the second edition of his book English as a Global Language, Crystal predicts that there was nothing likely to stop the continued spread of the English language as a global lingua franca, "at least in the foreseeable future" (2012, p. 9). Twenty-four years later, it seems that his prediction was not far from the truth. Due to its omnipresence, the English language has influenced many languages around the world. BCS did not manage to escape that influence and therefore it has been affected in many different ways. The word "influence" here could easily be replaced by the word "change" since the English language has changed languages around the world in different ways. That change has not been sudden but rather very subtle. The English language has had to come a long way from being taught only in school to being used in the media and then also in the streets among the native speakers of other languages.
We can argue with certainty that the expansion of media and social networks has greatly helped English in its process of becoming the leading language in the world. This influence on the native languages would not be so great without the existence of mass and social media (Dubravac & Skopljak, 2020). Many people, argues Čedić (2008), especially younger generations, tend to use English simply because it is "cool", "in" and "modern" or because of "fad" and "fashion" (p. 26). Simeunović (2008) also believes that the use of Anglicisms has become to be the "symbol of status" (p. 193). She further argues that we encounter an abundance of Anglicism in many professions. Sometimes, their use is justified, but in many cases, native speakers use them only to sound more "eloquent", "modern", "cool", or even "educated". Just like there is a tendency among some people to use longer words to sound "smarter", similarly, some people tend to use English words to impress their listeners (Dubravac & Skopljak, 2020). This phenomenon of using English words and its linguistic forms increasingly, led to the creation of some hybrid languages, such as Spanglish or Serglish (Mišić Ilić, 2011) and many others. This might eventually even lead to the disappearance of some minority languages. In fact, what concerns the language purists most are undoubtedly the words or linguistic forms the speakers use quite spontaneously and unknowingly.
Moreover, the influence of English is not rarely visible at different levels, modifying even the syntax of other languages.
This research paper will investigate the impact of English on Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian or BCS as noticed in the corpus composed of papers related to business published online by a well-known news portal Klix. The analysis will reveal whether the impact is present only at the level of syntax, or it extends its influence over other levels of language use.

Literature review
There is a plethora of research studies and papers which examine the immense influence of English on Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian or in our case, on BCS. Most of the studies focus primarily on the reasons as well as on the results of this influence. It can be argued that the majority of authors agree that mass media, social media and new trends are the major source of these influences.
However, some authors believe that the globalization takes precedence over all the other factors. In their study The English language and globalisation (2008) Pašalić and Marinov explain how both globalization and the English language as a lingua franca led to considerable changes in the economic domain. Therefore, they continue, this resulted in many companies requiring from their employees "a good command of English" (p. 1). They conclude that "a fair knowledge of English has become a prerequisite for a professional and social promotion in Croatia" (p. 1). Along the same lines, Simeunović (2008) also believes that the influence of the English language as a lingua franca is most evident and prominent in the domains of economy or when it comes to the language, in the legal and business register (p. 193). These assumptions were confirmed by Isaković (2019) who found many characteristics of English as a Lingua Franca in the corpus collected from a few Bosnian companies internationally oriented. On the other hand, Dubravac (2016) and Šijerkić and Milak (2018), Šehović (2009) argue that this influence of the English language is most profound in the language of media, namely, the language of Bosnian press which has undergone a sea change in recent years. In a very similar study, Brdar (2010) investigates the presence of the English vocabulary in the language of Croatian media. She build her research around the collection of over 60 media texts and what she found is that those texts which were translated from the Available Online on https://mapub.org/mapeh/1-1/the-influence-of-the-english-language-on-bcs-with-the-focus-on-the-business-register/ English language, usually on the subject of British pop culture and music, had a great number of Anglicisms. However, the reason why the Anglicisms were used in other types of texts, she argues, is fad. Balenović and Grahovac-Pražić (2016) take matters a step further questioning whether Croatians can understand the language of mass media anymore since the influence of English is so enormous. The same issue was investigated by Skopjak (2017), who concluded that it happens quite often that Bosnian people resort to Anglicisms which they do not understand fully, but tend to use them following the current trends. It seems difficult to avoid the impact of English due to its presence in numerous domains of everyday life.
In a like manner, Milić (2013) claims that the English language has even found its way to the sports terminology, thus changing it profoundly. Milić explains "that English-Serbian language contacts in the field of sport are not only limited to the transfer of new forms with their inherent lexical content from English into Serbian, but (that) they also include taking over new English-based meanings, clippings and compound forms with non-inflectional Modifiers" (p. 1). Similarly, the presence of English was investigated and confirmed in other registers, music (Kajtazović, 2012), political and legal discourse (Ajšić, 2014, Bilbija & Osmankadić, 2016;Okičić, 2016), and advertising discourse (Dubravac & Milak, 2016), to name a few.
Taking into consideration all the previously mentioned findings by various authors the aim of this study was to investigate the significance of the influence English has on the language of Bosnian press with the focus on the business register.

Methodology
The aim of the current corpus-based study was to shed more light on the influence English has on the Bosnian language with the focus on the business register. Since there is no a ready-made corpus which could be with regard to the purpose of this research, a specialized written corpus was designed. The corpus comprises 148 phrases which were collected through the analysis of a significant number of texts from the news portal Klix. The Klix news portal was purposefully chosen due to the fact that it is the most read and prominent news portal in Bosnia. Since the focus of the study was the business register, only the texts from the Klix's Business news section were selected and analyzed.
Having regard to the Simeunović's claim that the influence is evident "at all levels of language" (2008, p. 194), the language of the selected texts was analyzed in terms of writing, pronunciation, grammar, semantics, pragmatics. It was found that the impact of English is most notable both on the lexical and syntactic level. Therefore, only the lexical and syntactic features of the corpus data were analyzed along with the ways in which the phrases from the corpus were spelled. When it comes to the organization of the results and discussion part, it is divided into three sections: the examples of lexical influence, the examples of syntactic influence and the influence at the level of writing or spelling.
For the purposes of this study, Čedić's classification of Anglicisms was used, as well as Simeunović's classification in terms of shape, creation and justification of Anglicisms (Simeunović, 2008, p. 198).

The examples of lexical influence
Out of 148 phrases from the corpus, 113 or 76% of phrases were influenced at the lexical level. Most of these Anglicisms were common Anglicisms, but still, a great number of them were brand-new Anglicisms which means that more and more word are weaving their way into BCS. When it comes to the parts of speech which were mostly influenced, those are nouns primarily, then verbs and adjectives, which confirmed the findings of the previous studies (Dubravac, 2016;Šijerkić & Milak, 2018). Available Online on https://mapub.org/mapeh/1-1/the-influence-of-the-english-language-on-bcs-with-the-focus-on-the-business-register/ As expected, most of the nouns were common Anglicisms. Some of the examples of these common Anglicisms from the corpus are: grant, plan, industrija, sektor, direktor, marketing, korporacija. Nouns such as plan and grant look like their English counterparts completely. However, nouns korporacija, industrija, direktor, sektor and marketing resemble their English counterparts a lot. The difference is mostly only in one letter and it is almost every time the letter "c" (director vs. direktor). These borrowings act like any other nouns in BCS and inflections can be attached to them. However, even with the inflectional endings, many English speakers would recognize these words and the translation for these nouns is even not that necessary.
When it comes to the borrowed verbs, it is important to explain that even some of verb features were borrowed. It can be seen on the following example, namely the verb implementirati. The actual example was used together with the other two borrowings from the English, plan and reforme, which shows that even greater linguistic forms are borrowed from the English language. The same could be said about the following examples: nominovati (za nešto), formirati (vlast), alocirati, dominirati (mostly common). Moreover, even some hybrid examples, such as *ukalkulirati (see example 2) were found which show the immensity of the influence of the English language.
(2) Prvi je novac, a drugi javni tender koji ima svoje faze i vremensko trajanje u koje često znaju biti ukalkulirani i mjeseci odlučivanja nakon uobičajenih žalbi konkurencije. 5 Many adjectives in the corpus were also borrowings. However, what is a specific feature of these borrowings is that they are mostly "nativized" and adjusted to the linguistic rules of BCS, probably since they are usually used in clusters with other words which are not necessarily the borrowings.

The examples of syntactic influence
In accordance with previous studies (Dubravac, 2016;Šijerkić & Milak, 2018)  at examples of the syntactic level is no less significant than the influence on the lexical level. If we analyze the examples of the borrowed inflections, we will see that most of these inflections came together with the borrowed words they were part of (e. g. viceguverner, info sesija) (example 3). However, after some time certain inflections, such auto, mikro as in the examples mala i mikro preduzeća, autodijelovi, kompatibilnih automotive kompanija, became independent and nowadays BCS speakers use them to forms other nouns and the like. Basically, these types of flections fall into the second group of Anglicisms according to Čedić (2008), namely productive Anglicisms.
(3) Konačno, ove info sesije, dokaz su potrebe nastavka saradnje i podrške investicionim projektima dijaspore. 6 All the languages can be classified into synthetic or analytic languages. The first ones are those in which syntactic relations are expressed by inflectional morphemes rather than by word order, whereas analytic languages are those in which syntactic relations are expressed primarily by word order rather than by inflection (Denham & Lobeck, 2012, p. 185). Most European languages are indeed synthetic, whereas English, even though it has some synthetic features, falls into the latter group, and as such is different from BCS, a synthetic language. Therefore, BCS and English belong to the separate groups of languages and as a result of that some of their features are significantly different from each other. However, this did not stop BCS speakers to borrow even some syntactically different linguistic forms form English such as modification.
In BCS, nouns are usually modified by adjectives and nouns cannot modify other nouns. However, in recent times, we can encounter many examples of this modification which sound unnatural in BCS. Some of these examples are: internet stranica, biznis sector, lizing sector, direktor brend dizajna, grant program, advertajzing industrija, faktoring system, panel diskusija and so on (see examples 4a, 4b, 4c). As it is evident, instead of saying internetska stranica the author of the texts used noun internet to modify noun stranica. The same was done in the other examples and what is surprising is that a great number of these examples was found. As for the use of these types of modification in BCS, we can argue that it is not justified even if there are no TE (translation equivalents) or BCS counterparts for some nouns such as grant or factoring.  EBRD u Sarajevu. 9 This type of noun modification is used most in the branding, labeling, the names of certain summits, conferences, fairs and the like. Some of the following examples from the corpus serve to support this claim: SBF (Sarajevo Business Forum), Sarajevo Business Bridge Awards, Jahorina ekonomski forum, Brending konferencija, Samit 16+1, AS Holding kompanija (examples 5a,5b,5c). When it comes to the collocations borrowed from English, these are mostly verb collocations. As it has been pointed out before, sometimes even larger linguistic forms are borrowed, as it can be seen in the following examples of verb collocation borrowings: implementirati projekat, projektovan rast, nominovan za najboljeg CEO-a. Most probably, when some words are borrowed, such as verbs in these examples, even their syntactic features are borrowed along with them. In this case, these are their collocation features.
The example from the corpus prepoznato i nagrađeno od strane kvalifikovanih eksperata is a great example of passive by structure borrowing. BCS is a language which gives more prominence to the active voice and therefore some passive structure, such as passive by phase sound unnatural in certain registers. This passive linguistic form is common in legal register or some other registers, but in other registers it is not preferable to use this form. However, with the influence from the English language, even that aspect of BCS is undergoing change.

The level of writing
As it has been stated previously, the examples were also analyzed in terms of spelling or writing. One of the findings was that there are many inconsistencies regarding the spelling of these examples simply due to the fact that some borrowings are brand new and they were not domesticated or adopted enough. This is evident in the examples such web-stranica vs. web stranica, e-mail vs. email (or even imejl) and the like.
Also, in the names of conferences, forums, festivals and similar events, we can see the tendency to write each word of the name in the capital letters which is a feature of English and not BCS (e. g. Sarajevo Business Forum instead of Sarajevski poslovni forum).
However, when it comes to common borrowings from English, we can argue that there is some consistency in the spelling as well as that some rules regarding the spelling of these borrowing can be formed, such as that letter "c" is usually changed into "k" (director is changed into direktor), letter "x" into the cluster "sk" (expansion is changed into ekspanzija), and so on. Also, some inflections or suffixes precisely are consistently translated in the same manner, such as -ship into -stvo (partnership into partnerstvo), -(t)ion into -cija (action into akcija) and the like.

Conclusion
The presented study deals with the English borrowings and analyzes them in terms of their syntactic and lexical features. The results of this study showed that the influence of the English on BCS is very significant. All the examples from the corpus were taken from a collection of texts published by the news portal Klix. Corpus comprised 148 words out which 76% of examples presented lexical influences and the rest, or 24%, presented the lexical influence. This shows that the influence is most notable at the level of lexicals. Nouns are a part of speech which is influenced most, but the verbs and the adjectives are not resistant to this change and influence.
When it comes to the syntactic influence of English, even the inflections were borrowed. Some of these inflections such as auto, moto and others, were domesticated and nowadays they act just like any other BCS inflection. Besides inflections, modification patterns, especially the noun modification, were borrowed. Therefore, many examples showed that due to this influence more and more nouns in BCS are being modified by other nouns, which is not natural in BCS. Also, the collocations did not escape this influence and many collocations, especially verb collocation were borrowed.
When their spelling was analyzed, it was evident that there are many inconsistencies in the spelling of these borrowings mostly because these borrowing did not go through the process of adaptation to BCS. However, some rules regarding the spelling of these borrowings could be formed such as the change of the letter "c" to the letter "k" and the like. Available Online on https://mapub.org/mapeh/1-1/the-influence-of-the-english-language-on-bcs-with-the-focus-on-the-business-register/ Finally, when the Klix articles were analyzed it was found that every text had around 30-40 (or even more) Anglicisms or linguistic forms influenced by the English language. Taking into consideration the fact that the average Klix article has around 250 words, 30 to 40 Anglicism per the article on average, or 12%-16% of the article, is a lot and it shows how big and significant the influence of English on BCS is. There are many reasons for that, and some of them have been even mentioned in the study, such as fad, but this aspect of the influences requires for more substantial analysis.
As the opinions on the Anglicisms are divided, it would be significant to investigate this phenomenon more substantially. The questions such as whether English (or any foreign language) is enriching or threatening (our) language are still mainly unanswered. Even though some researchers paid more attention to the reasons behind there is a tendency to use Anglicisms more increasingly, the subject still remains not completely tackled and therefore, some further research will be needed. Also, most of the studies deal with the borrowings in the written language, thus leaving the spoken language aside. So, continued research into this aspect of English-Bosnian connection appears fully justified.