Anglicisms in the Technology Section of the Spanish Press: A Corpus-based Analysis

Treball Final de Grau en Estudis Anglesos.Codi: EA0938. Curs: 2014-2015Globalisation and the power of English as Lingua Franca (ELF) in different spheres have had a great impact on the spread of English all over the world. Several Anglicisms have been loaned to other languages, which have acquired those new terms in specific fields like sports or technology. The Oxford dictionary1 defines Anglicism as: ‘A word or phrase borrowed from English into a foreign language’. Thus, an Anglicism is any word that a language acquires from English. Taking into account these aspects, the aim of this study is to explore the technology section of the press in order to explore the evolution of the quantity of Anglicisms in a period of time that comprises the following: 1994, 2004 and 2014; the most used Anglicisms in each year; and which type of Anglicisms is the most frequent of the three (i.e. pure, adapted or calque). The sample for this study consists of 36 pieces of news related to technology extracted from the online newspaper library El País. The software AntConc and the Real Academia de la Lengua Española2 (RAE) dictionary have been employed to analyse the texts extracted from El País in order to find Anglicisms. Results in Anglicisms tokens showed different rates of Anglicisms in 1994 (2.01%) in comparison to the results obtained in other years, however, the results of 2004 (4.6%) and 2014 (4.55%) were similar. Besides, the most frequent type of Anglicisms differed in those years. In 1994 (44.64%), calque was the most frequent type of Anglicism, in 2014 (42.3%) pure Anglicisms was the most used type. Therefore, it can be determined that the impact of English through Anglicisms had evolved to a greater extent in Spanish in the last two decades