Speech errors in Internet product reviews as a marker of population literacy

The aim of the research is to determine the relationship between the formation of linguistic competence in native Russian speakers and the occurrence of speech errors in Internet customer product reviews. The paper examines the problem of the general decline in literacy among the Russian population due to the shift of communication to the online space. The research is novel in that it is the first one to establish the connection between acquiring basic knowledge of the Russian language and its actual application in composing a written text, i.e., an Internet product review. As a result, the research revealed that there are various reasons for the occurrence of speech errors in Internet reviews: the lack of rules and restrictions in real Internet communication, the trend towards the convergence of oral and written communication in the online space, as well as the prevalence of features of colloquial style in Internet texts. The paper demonstrates that authors of Internet reviews exhibit insufficient assimilation of the rules of orthography and punctuation in modern Russian, as well as an inability to apply them in practice.