Anglicisms in Internet slang

English words form the core of online slang in dozens of languages. A gamer from Seoul, a student from Hamburg, and a schoolgirl from Perm write " lol," " easy, " and " gg, " and in each case, the same borrowing history lies behind the letters. The Russian-language Internet provides the richest material on this topic: it has a documented chronology from Fidonet jargon to today’s " cringe."

An Anglicism is a word or phrase that originates from English or is modeled after English. Online slang is a layer of vocabulary exchanged within communities: gamers, bloggers, IT professionals, and imageboard users. The term " jargon " is similar in function, and in works about the RuNet, both words are often used interchangeably, such as the FidoNet dictionary, " Albanian, " or Lurkspeak.

The massive influx of English vocabulary online began in the 1990s and continues unabated. Software, games, documentation, and even communication protocols were created in English, and young users acquired these borrowed words along with their keyboards. According to the RELOD portal, citing research from Gramota.ru, approximately 70% of teenagers regularly use words like " cringe," " hype, " and " rofl."

Prehistory: English words before the internet

English vocabulary entered the Russian language long before the modem. Trade contacts in the 16th century brought names for measures, weights, monetary units, and titles: pound, shilling, mister, sir. The Peter the Great era opened the way to maritime and military terminology, with words like "barge" and "avral" becoming established in the language. The total influx of foreign words from that era is estimated at approximately three thousand units.

The nineteenth century added sports and technical terms — sport, football, hockey, elevator, trolleybus, jacket. The rate then slowed. L. P. Krysin notes that the influx of Anglicisms remained weak until the 1990s, when the collapse of the USSR and open borders created a " favorable period " for borrowings.

Before the internet, slang was driven by professional environments. The widespread adoption of personal computers in the mid-1980s brought a vast technical vocabulary, and the colloquial form of this terminology was primarily used by young professionals. Computer jargon, like other slang, was most prevalent in the spoken language of young people.

The network as a channel of penetration

Usenet, which operated in the 1980s and 1990s, and its bulletin board systems established the first consistent abbreviations of online speech. Canadian Wayne Pearson, by his own recollection, coined "LOL" in the early 1980s on the Viewline message board; no recordings of that conversation survive, and researchers find the first documented use in a May 1989 issue of the FidoNews newsletter. The Oxford Dictionary lists a 1993 Usenet post as the earliest confirmed instance, in which the author left a movie and commented on the experience.

In Russia, online communication began on Fidonet: it launched in the spring of 1990 as a mail system compatible with Polish nodes. Users were called "fidoshniki" (fiddlers), and they developed their own vocabulary — node, point, netmail, echomail, and route. Those who simply wrote emails and didn’t attend parties were called "virtuals." The network’s popularity peaked in the 1990s, but then the mass internet reduced the number of its nodes.

The " Fidonet vs. Internet " debates in the middle of the decade resembled religious wars, according to participants: some believed in an open network with HTTP and IRC, while others valued the leisurely pace of Fidonet communication. The legacy of that era lives on in modern vocabulary: " smiley," " flood," " ban," and " moderator " have outlived the technology that brought them into being.

LOL reached the RuNet by the late 1990s. The Cyrillic spelling " lol " became widespread in 2002, and the acronym itself gained popularity in the second half of the 2000s, along with blogs.

How language processes foreign words

Krysin defined borrowing as the transfer of elements from one language into the system of another as a result of more or less prolonged contact. The Internet has reduced the timeframe for this transition from decades to weeks: a word acquires Russian suffixes before linguists have a chance to write about it.

The first step in mastering the word is recording. English words are rendered in Cyrillic based on their sound: hype becomes " hayp," cringe becomes " kring," and user becomes " yuzer." Acronyms retain the Latin alphabet or switch to Cyrillic: LOL and " lol," ROFL and " rofl." Truncations follow the English pattern: easy became " izi," and overpowered became " op " in game chat.

The second stage is grammar. The verbal suffix -it (-to) attaches to English roots without resistance: to flex, to cringe, to chill, to ban, to upnut (-to up). Adjectives also grow from these same roots: cringe-worthy, hype-loving, vibe-loving. Word formation goes further: " user " yielded the adjective " usersky," the participle " used," and the mocking compound " yuzver " (-to use) for an experienced user without administrative skills. The name of the compression format "zip" gave rise to a whole nest of terms: to zip, to zazipovanny, to zipovsky.

The third step is semantics. A word’s meaning can shift far from its English original: in just one year, " flexit " shifted from club dancing to bragging. According to E. V. Marinova, semantic borrowings, secondary meanings, and shifts in meaning account for approximately 30% of the collected data from modern research.

A separate layer is pseudo-Anglicisms, neologisms that look English but are unrecognizable to native speakers. Krysin saw the survival of any borrowing as communicative necessity: a word is retained in speech when there is a need for it and it fits the genre’s characteristics of communication. Online slang tests this condition annually. Hundreds of words are eliminated, only a few remain.

Why does slang need English words?

Shorthand saves time. In game chat, you only have a second to respond, and " imba " is shorter than " unbalanced character." Borrowing distinguishes between " friends " and " foes ": Krongauz directly called " olbansky " a recognition system where spelling works like a password. The English word also provides emotional precision where the Russian equivalent sounds bookish: " cringe " is livelier and shorter than " a feeling of embarrassment for someone else’s actions."

Researchers trace a common acquisition route: Anglicisms enter speech through online communication, adapt to the Russian language system, and then diverge into spoken language and the language of the media, where terms like " vibe," " hype, " and " party " are found. Authors of journal articles on youth slang words draw similar conclusions: intensive international online contacts lead to widespread borrowing, and Russian youth regularly use English words in online communication. Words like " cringe," " flexit, " and " crash " help teenagers accurately convey emotions, assess situations, and build their social environment.

Slang of scumbags and " Albanian "

In the early 2000s, the RuNet gave birth to the most studied online jargon. The " Padonkaff " style is built on deliberately distorted spelling with almost untouched phonetics: " preved," " yazig," " afftar zhzhot." The style itself spread as a grotesque reaction to the numerous spelling errors in online publications.

The precursors were the jargons of Fidonet, the ru.punk.rock conference, and the speech of the Kashchenites, whose echo conference has been known since around the end of December 1998. Blogs provided the impetus: scumbags left " comments " on LiveJournal and forums. Dmitry Sokolovsky, the administrator of the website udaff.com, known as Udav, is often credited with spreading the jargon online.

Psychotherapist D.V. Kovpak assessed its origins differently: in his opinion, the " padonkaff " language did not arise spontaneously, but as a result of the targeted work of enthusiasts — first in written online form, then in spoken language.

The name " Albanian " itself was coined in October 2004. An English-speaking LiveJournal user named scottishtiger expressed outrage at Russian text in someone else’s journal, and his interlocutors responded by saying they read Albanian. A flash mob of " Albanian Russian lessons " followed. The slang has no connection to the Albanian language, and the name stuck through repetition.

Maxim Krongauz dedicated a popular science book, " The Olbanian Self-Study Guide, " to this style. In it and in later assessments, he described " Olbanian " as a play on spelling, a fashion for anti-spelling, and a system of " friend/foe " recognition, rather than a fully-fledged language. Philologists list the style’s techniques precisely: erratives, the substitution of unstressed vowels, the devoicing and voicing of consonants, the spellings " zhy " and " shy," word splicing, and memetic exceptions.

Hello, dear bear

The painting " Bear Surprise " by American artist John Lurie is a watercolor: a bear on two legs surprises a couple in a clearing and shouts " Surprise! " On February 3, 2006, Lobzz user Roman Yatsenko from Donetsk posted it in the " Leprosarium " section of the website dirty.ru and replaced the English exclamation with " Hello! "

Within weeks, the bear was everywhere. It was painted on walls, printed on T-shirts, and featured in advertisements; newspapers wrote about the image, and politicians mentioned it. The meme spread across blogs and forums in February 2006, triggering a wave of media coverage.

The word originated online. Before " hello, " internet slang hadn’t become a greeting in the everyday speech of an entire country. The bear from Luri’s painting acquired a name and the status of a standalone RuNet meme character.

Lurkoyaz

The wiki site " Lurkomorye " wrote articles in a jargon culled from internet memes. The lexicon was compiled from common internet jargon, the speech of scumbags and kashchinites, with the addition of their own neologisms. The expression " lurk moar " existed on Russian-language imageboards even before the site’s creation: the distorted "more" became moar.

The website itself called this style a journalistic language, suitable for articles but unsuitable for conversation. The dialect has almost no original words; almost everything is borrowed from elsewhere.

Gamers’ slang

Gaming jargon in Russia began to emerge at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, along with the spread of personal computers and online gaming. Online games take place in real time, with players communicating via text and voice, and slang primarily saves seconds: the shorter the word, the faster the command.

" Noob " is a portmanteau of " newbie " and "boob, " and serves as a derogatory term for a player who hasn’t mastered tactics and asks stupid questions. " Imba," a truncated form of "imbalanced," refers to an overly powerful character or item that provides an advantage; in everyday speech, the word is easily used to praise anything. " Mobs " (from " mob ") are uncontrollable characters, and " aggro " means to provoke them into attacking.

Russian World of Warcraft servers launched on August 6, 2008. Before then, players had to learn a minimum of English words and abbreviations, and local slang developed from English words written in Russian letters. Some of this vocabulary has migrated into everyday speech: " noob," " agritsya, " and " easy " are now heard in office chats.

General chat added its own formulas: wp and ggwp — " well played," ez — " easy," sus — " suspicious." " Cheesing " (from "cheesing") denotes victory through unfair tactics or exploits. Phonetic distortions of English words yielded " team " and " tank."

Words of the twenties

The wave of the 2010s and 2020s brought the vocabulary of short videos and meme communities. " Cringe " comes from cringe, " to shrink, to shrink," and denotes a feeling of shame or embarrassment at someone else’s actions. Initially, the word was used by gamers with a different connotation: to shudder in disgust, to shrink in horror. The lexeme then migrated from narrow slang to common online communication, and then to everyday conversation. The adjective " cringe " and the adverb " cringeous " caught on immediately.

" Flexit " managed to change its meaning in just one year. The verb originated from "to flex," meaning " to bend or wiggle," and referred to a club-style movement that involved swaying to the rhythm; then rap culture added the connotation, and the word came to mean " to show off, to boast about one’s clothes, style, or money." The psychology of the gesture is simple: in clubs, young people are constantly trying to stand out from the crowd, and the word captured this gesture.

" Hype " comes from hype, " buzz," the increased attention paid to a topic, person, or product in the media and social networks. " Rofl " stands for "rolling on the floor laughing, " and has given rise to the derivatives " rofl " and " roflian." " Vibe " broadened the semantic range to encompass the overall impression of a place, person, or event — it’s used to describe the atmosphere, energy, and character. " Crush " (from crush) refers to the object of a secret crush, and " toxic " (from toxic) refers to a toxic person or toxic behavior. Chill is the source of the verb " to chill " and the phrase " na chile," a state of relaxation.

The dictionary portal RELOD is celebrating new additions to its 2025 list: Oxford named "brain rot" (" brain rot " from consuming meaningless content) one of the top words of 2024, "slop" is applied to low-quality texts generated by neural networks, and "sigma" describes a successful person outside the race for traditional leadership.

Parallels in other languages

The Japanese internet developed its own laughter marker: the letter w, the first in the verb warau, " to laugh, " is placed at the end of a phrase, and strings of "www" reinforce the humor. The convention emerged on Japanese boards in the late 1990s and spread through Nico Nico Douga. Then came a visual play: a long row of "w"s resembles grass, and the character 草, " grass," came to mean " very funny."

The German way is grammatical. The mixture of German and English, nicknamed Denglisch, yields the verbs downloaden, googeln, chatten, and liken, which are conjugated according to German rules: ich downloade, the participle gedownloadet. The Russian " zipovat " (to zip) follows exactly the same pattern.

The pattern is repeated everywhere. Local grammar takes the English root as its building block, and each language processes it according to its own rules of phonetics and morphology.

Native speakers’ reactions and dictionaries

Borrowed words irritate some speakers. In September 2026, the book service Litres and a research company found that jargon irritates people in everyday speech more than other words, and respondents most often cited " cringe " in an open-ended question; irritating examples included " case," " trigger," " hype, " and " fake."

Institutions move more slowly than the internet. Lyudmila Kapitanova, a doctor of philology at Pskov State University, says that dictionaries include words that have become part of the Russian language, and " cringe, " based on frequency of use, is among the candidates. For English, the path has been shorter: "LOL" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary back in 2011 as an interjection in email correspondence, indicating a joke or expressing amusement.