Lexical Variation in the Economic Sociolect of the Italian and Spanish Newspapers

Abstract

Frequent contacts between the English language and Italian and Spanish languages speeds up the anglicisms lexical transfer process in these neo-Latin languages. Contact situations open up a series of communication channels between different social groups which are reflected in the use of English terms adopted by the Italian and Spanish. The Italian and Spanish newspapers economic context is conditioned by the presence of a large number of lexical anglicisms, as an attestation of linguistic primacy and meaning of cultural prestige. The scale of this phenomenon is quantified by observing real facts, in accordance with the quantitative model of variationist sociolinguistics. Over the last half-century, it has seen a growth in the study of the phenomenon of bilingualism, especially between the Romance languages and English language. The phonological variation studies have been added the lexical and semantic. However, the approaches to these phenomena are not always analysed from a sociolinguistic point of view. The vast literature tends to describe intuitively situations of changes and lexical substitutions from English on the economic Italian and Spanish press, rather than a quantitative evaluation of the phenomenon. This article shows thus the real impact of anglicisms (code-switching and calque) on the economic and financial Italian and Spanish newspapers. In addition, the collected data analysis made it possible to compare the two social contexts, from which the different circumstances of lexical importations and substitutions are determined.