According to Svobodová, the reason why Czechs are nowadays using many anglicisms or entire English expressions in their daily communication both online and offline is because it is often very difficult, or even impossible, to find appropriate one-word Czech equivalents. With rapid technological progress, new words (neologisms) need to be invented, and needless to say, these words come overwhelmingly from English.¹⁰

MORPHOLOGY

In terms of the morphological processes that are at play in the adoption of English words by Czech speakers, the first thing to note is that we have to assign a gender to each word. Next, when deriving nouns, adjectives, adverbs, or new verbs from English lexemes, most of the time, the root of the English word is preserved in its more or less original form and one or more Czech derivational affixes are added to create new meaning.¹⁰ You will find some real-world examples of these processes in the discussion of my own research.

PRONUNCIATION AND SPELLING

In writing, some words will retain their original English spelling and will only be enhanced by certain inflectional or derivational morphological processes. However, in most cases, the spelling will be altered to make the words easier to pronounce, especially for those who aren’t proficient in English.¹¹

SYNTAX

According to Konvička, the traditional Czech syntax is undergoing rapid changes as well. One example is the new usage of the conjunction protože, meaning ‘because’. He explains that we would normally expect to see a subordinate clause follow this conjunction. However, what we can observe is that particularly on Twitter, users often include just a single noun phrase after this conjunction.¹²

Additionally, Prokšová argues that the influence of English is visible in the (prescriptively wrong) omittance of Czech auxiliary verbs. This creates new constructions that are understandable but not entirely correct in terms of prescriptive grammar rules.²