Present-day Spanish fashion lexicon dresses up in English

Beatriz Rodríguez Arrizabalaga

doi:10.14198/raei.2017.30.09

Abstract

Lexical borrowings can be regarded as one of the clearest and most direct consequences of any language contact situation. However, not all the borrowings that enter a language are alike. Since their entrance in a given language is motivated by different reasons, two general kinds of borrowings must be distinguished: necessary borrowings which name ideas and concepts for which the recipient language does not have any equivalent term; and superfluous borrowings which, on the contrary, refer to realities for which the recipient language already has equivalent terms. This paper focuses on the latter type. Specifically, it presents a diachronic corpus-based analysis of 14 English fashion terms with a clear Spanish lexical counterpart —blazer/‘chaqueta’, celebrity/‘famoso’, clutch/‘bolso de mano’, cool/‘de moda’, fashion/‘moda’, fashionable/‘de moda’, fashionista/ ‘adicto a la moda’, jeans/‘vaqueros’, nude/‘color carne’, photocall/‘sesión de fotos’, shorts/‘pantalones cortos’, sporty/‘deportivo’, trench/‘trinchera, gabardina’, and trendy/‘moderno’— in four Spanish corpora: the Corpus del Español, and the CORDE, CREA and CORPES XXI corpora. My objectives are twofold: firstly, to demonstrate to what extent these unnecessary Anglicisms are increasingly becoming part of the everyday contemporary Peninsular Spanish fashion lexicon; and secondly, to account for the three reasons that underlie their alleged constant entrance in twenty-first century Peninsular Spanish: (i) globalization and the impact of English on Spanish; (ii) the highly visible presence of English in the field of advertising; (iii) and the selling power of English.

Highlights

One of the clearest and most direct consequences of any language contact situation is borrowings
The first significant inference that stands out from my diachronic corpus-based analysis is that all the Anglicisms examined, except for fashionable and sporty, exhibit a much higher frequency of occurrence in present-day Peninsular Spanish than in any of the other stages of its evolution, as manifest in Table 2, where both the raw and normalized frequencies per million words for each of them —abbreviated, respectively, as RF and NF— are indicated
Notice in this regard that the total number of 44 Anglicisms attested from the tenth to the twentieth centuries —16 found in Davies’ Corpus del Español and the remaining 28 ones in the Corpus Diacrónico del Español (CORDE) corpus— rises to 661, a figure fifteen times bigger, in the last quarter of the twentieth century and the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century; 95 Anglicisms have been found, in the annotated version of the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA) corpus and 566 in the CORPES XXI corpus: ANGLICISMS Blazer (1880)

Summary

Introduction

One of the clearest and most direct consequences of any language contact situation is borrowings. In one of the two large and different “schools” or “traditions”, as Gómez Capuz (2004: 13) calls them, where the analysis of such a complex phenomenon originated: on the one hand, the North-American tradition (cf Bloomfield, 1933; Haugen, 1950; Weinreich, 1953), which, socially oriented, is mainly interested in examining the influence of American English in the diverse European linguistic communities of immigrants located in USA; and on the other, the European school (cf Betz, 1949; Deroy, 1956; Klajn, 1972), which, being, in turn, more linguistically oriented, focuses on the phenomenon of lexical borrowings between European languages of a similar prestige and status, like, for instance, English, French, Italian, German and Spanish The existence of these two schools, with such diverse and distinct aims, objectives and orientation, has provided many and varied terms for the phenomenon at issue, creating some terminological confusion. Its adoption of English as lingua franca, as will be elucidated in section 5, leaves no room for doubt (cf. De Mooij, 1994: 5; Bathia, 2008: 166)

The Language of Advertising

Data and Methodology

Results

Conclusions