The < y> and the y-ssified: Online-exclusive expressions of the diminutive in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian

Abstract

The focus of this paper is on a particular non-standard, online-specific orthographic convention in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian that is most commonly observed in use by young people on Twitter which involves the substitution of the rightmost-edge vowel in a given word with the grapheme < y>. A study conducted in two parts aimed to construct a preliminary grammatical profile of its application. The first part compiled a small-scale corpus of tweets that used < y> and came up with three categories that its pragmatic usage could be sorted into, based on the semantic and pragmatic profile of the verbal diminutive in BCS. The second study compared the acceptability of < y> to that of the nominal diminutive in BCS across the three categories, which were characterized as “friendly”, “humorous”, and “upset”. The results of this survey show that while the diminutive was more acceptable across all pragmatic categories on average, there were some categories such as “upset” which were more likely to be associated with < y> than the diminutive.