"Kartta" or "Mäppi"?: Anglicisms in the Spoken Lexicon of Finnish Gamers

Abstract

This thesis examines the prevalence of Anglicisms in the spoken lexicon of Finnish gamers. When a speaker of Finnish encounters in-game terminology whilst playing a video game in English, there are two common ways in which they tend to combat this language barrier: through spontaneous translation or borrowing. The latter of the two phenomena is a form of language mixing, which places the communicative context of video games onto a multilingual continuum of interest. Alongside this linguistic perspective, the theoretical framework of this research also considers the use of English among Finnish speakers more broadly as well as the nuances of gamer discourse. The data for this thesis has been obtained through the conduction of a small-scale, multiple-choice survey for Finnish-speaking gamers, in which respondents were asked whether they preferred the Anglicism over the Finnish translation of a term presented on an imaginary English user interface. The compiled data set of these results is divided into three categories of terms with a high, split, and low Anglicism preference, which are utilized to consider plausible motivations behind the popularity of specific Anglicisms. The four factors under examination are morphological integration, word length, degree of acceptance, and term equivalence. The objective of this thesis is to identify which of the Anglicisms in the survey are most prevalent in the spoken lexicon of Finnish gamers and to discover potential patterns behind the most and least used Anglicisms. Seven of the fifteen terms received a high Anglicism preference percentage, and several potential factors which may have influenced this outcome are found, including part of speech, word length, and presence in specialized terminology. Ultimately, this research may incentivize future studies in relation to language mixing, spontaneous translation, and video game localization.