Experts say Web 2.0 rulez

Hooray, yet another showcase of the greatness of influence of  Web 2.0 instruments into people’s lives! Langauge experts believe that social networking, blogging, micro-blogging, podcasting and video-casting, and other stuff that in general referred as Web 2.0 instuments, play a big role in peoples daily life. You say why?

Read this piece of news.

According to the association’s [American Dialect Society] latest round of popularity studies into the English language, Google (as in ‘Google it’) has emerged as the top word of the last decade, while ‘tweet’ has been crowned the top word of 2009.

Google, as a word, has firmly grasped its place not only in English language, but also in Russian – as a verb ‘прогуглить’ (read as progooglitj), which means ‘search in Google”. It is becoming more and more often when you hear people saying “прогугли его/ее”. For instance, I use it in average 15-20 times a day. However, you cannot say the same thing concerning the word ‘tweet’, either because Twitter is not that popular as Google in Russian speaking part of the world, or it is hard to make a derivative from word ‘twitter’ in Russian language. Though, there is a word ‘фолловить’ (read as followitj), derived from the word ‘follow’ (Twitter’s “follow me” phrase).

There are also such words as ‘юзать’ (read as yuzatj) derived from the word ‘use’, ‘зафрендить/отфрендить’ (read as zafrenditl/otdrenditj) derived from ‘friend’ (‘add as a friend/remove from friends’).

Unfortunately, I could not find similar analyses of Russian language experts about such ‘internet era’ words.