Abstract

Although modern surfing can be traced back to early 20th century Hawaii, only quite recently has surfing become a truly global phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to discuss how the arrival of such a new cultural phenomenon as surfing to the Spanish and Portuguese speaking world is managed linguistically, i.e. to account for how one goes about talking about surfing in Portuguese and Spanish. I propose to investigate how the existing surfing vocabulary in English affects surf talk in Portuguese and Spanish. On the one hand, I will determine which words are incorporated as such and which pieces are incorporated as semantic loans. On the other hand, I will describe what old, native vocabulary is adapted to fit the needs of surf talk. The results indicate that loans are used in roughly 65 per cent of the surfing terms in both Portuguese and Spanish. On a more detailed level, the surfing manoeuvres and conditions, for example, are mostly lexicalized using direct loans, as the terms rentry ‘re-entry’ and bottom ‘bottom turn’ used in the title indicate. Waves, on the other hand, are most often described by means of loan translations, i.e. using Portuguese and Spanish terms reflecting English uses. For example, the goal of any surfer is to ride a tube, tubo in both Portuguese and Spanish. The main difference between the two languages is found in the manoeuvre terms, where Portuguese has introduced several own expressions (e.g. cavada and rasgada) while Spanish relies almost uniquely on direct loans from English.

Highlights

  • The history of modern surfing can be traced back to the early 20th century Hawaii, Australia and the Californian coastline (Esparza, 2017; Finnegan, 2018), but only quite recently has surfing become a truly global phenomenon

  • The overarching questions I will attempt to answer are: Which loan words are incorporated as such? Which pieces are incorporated as loan translations? And what native vocabulary is reused or recycled so as to fit the needs of surf talk? The aim of the paper is i) to characterize the surfing vocabulary used in Portuguese in Spanish with an emphasis on the presence of English loanwords; and ii) to account for the relationship between the use of loanwords and own expressions for talking about surfing in Portuguese and Spanish

  • In this paper I have provided an account for the presence of English loan words in the Portuguese and Spanish language of surfing, focusing on a set of some 200 surfing terms in both languages

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Summary

Introduction

The history of modern surfing can be traced back to the early 20th century Hawaii, Australia and the Californian coastline (Esparza, 2017; Finnegan, 2018), but only quite recently has surfing become a truly global phenomenon. In a recent commercial newsletter (March 8, 2019), the Scandinavian airline SAS included as one of its offers quite a long piece (1700 words) called “Extreme surfing in Lofoten” on surfing in the exotic setting of Lofoten, a remote region in Norway, north of the Polar Circle. From a linguistic point-of-view, this means that in order to talk about surfing in other languages than English, the relevant concepts, i.e. the essential terminology, needs to be transferred by some means into the target language. This is a similar process as the one involving many specialized discourses within areas such as technology, economics, science, etc. This is a similar process as the one involving many specialized discourses within areas such as technology, economics, science, etc. (see Muñetón Pérez, 2011)

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