Researchers find English and Estonian mix mainly in compound nouns

English and Estonian are most often mixed in compound nouns in everyday speech, especially among video bloggers, Tallinn University linguists found, ERR reported.

The researchers, Anna Verschik and Helin Kask, examined texts from more than 40 blogs, 10 video blogs and eight podcasts. They analysed hundreds of thousands of words to understand how younger adults combine English with their native language.

The study found that video bloggers mixed the two languages twice as often as bloggers who write their content or podcast hosts.

Compound nouns accounted for 85 percent of all mixed-language expressions. Examples included “ilu-hack,” “pop-up pood,” “auto-trip,” “bomber-jakk” and “trummi-set.” English verbs such as “ära friikima” and longer phrases such as “must-have asjad” were much less common.

Although many of the borrowed expressions have official Estonian equivalents, people often prefer the English-derived versions online. Google data showed that the Estonian-language web contained 3.5 million results for “foto-shoot,” compared with 173,000 for the dictionary-recommended “fotosessioon.” “Auto-trip” also appeared in searches nearly five times more often than the Estonian “autoretke.”

The linguists said the findings were reassuring because the new words did not undermine the basic structure of Estonian. They found no examples in which an English element overturned Estonian sentence structure or the rules for inflecting native words.

The researchers attributed the free mixing of the languages to both psychology and their similar structures. English can help speakers express themselves more precisely or convey the right emotion. For example, “üli-happy” may sound less formal and heavy in casual speech than the traditional Estonian “üliõnnelik.”

The similar logic of the two languages also makes such wordplay easier. Speakers of both Estonian and English regularly create new concepts by combining two words, allowing Estonian speakers to incorporate English stems smoothly into their speech.

The researchers published their findings in the International Journal of Bilingualism.