Emprunts récents à l’anglais dans le lexique roumain du vêtement

Abstract

The present paper aims at investigating the impact of English upon the Romanian fashion vocabulary during the last decade through the analysis of a corpus picked up from specialized dictionaries, magazines, websites and mail-order catalogues. The recent English borrowings are approached from a functional perspective, paying special attention to the referential and persuasive functions fulfilled by such neologisms not only in the jargon of experts, but also in journalese and in advertising. Two major types of specialized Anglicisms are taken into consideration: (1) “necessary” technical borrowings motivated by the absence of Romanian equivalents, besides their precision, brevity and efficiency in naming new referents; (2) “luxury” or superfluous borrowings with medium or small specialization which simply double Romanian words as fashionable terms; (3) “trendy” expressive borrowings (words, phrases and clichés) taken from colloquial language and / or from youth slang, motivated by the prestige of the source language and the intention to impress the target audience. Linguistically, the most striking feature of the Anglicisms under discussion is the “foreign” aspect, due to their international character and to the Anglophile attitudes specific to the Romanian post-communist society.