English Borrowings In Spanish It Terminology: Language Conflicts And Contacts

Abstract

The article analyzes the process of borrowing and adapting English loan words in the Spanish information and communication technologies terminology. The Royal Spanish Academy takes a proactive position on the formation of linguistic policy to adapt borrowings. The English-origin terms recorded in the Dictionary of the Spanish Language, the features of their functioning according to the National Corpus (CORPES XXI) of the Spanish language are considered. According to the Dictionary of the Spanish Language, English borrowings make up a smaller part of the terms marked as Inform ‘Informatics’ or Telec ‘Telecommunications’ (35 terms), which is 27.9% of the total. The English borrowings recorded by the Spanish Dictionary in the latest edition are divided into adapted (28 units) and non-adapted (12 units). The Royal Spanish Academy recommends the spelling and grammatical adaptation of most English borrowings and suggests Spanish counterparts to certain English-origin terms. It is shown that the English borrowings, adapted and not adapted, interact with Spanish lexemes, obeying the syntagmatic structures of the recipient language, and form stable collocations, which confirms their high degree of assimilation. The analysis of the Corpus (CORPES XXI) reveals the instability in how users choose the grammatical category of borrowed words and their spelling, which indicates a dynamic factor in the development of the ICT term system, as well as the naturally ongoing process of the assimilation of English borrowings, which takes place independently of the regulatory actions of the Royal Spanish Academy.