¿Nos hacemos un/una selfie con la/el tablet? Cross-Linguistic Lexical Influence, Gender Assignment and Linguistic Policy in Spanish

Abstract

One of the immediate consequences of cross-linguistic lexical influence in languages that have an explicit gender system is the need to assign a gender to newly borrowed terms. In this paper, we analyze gender assignment in two recent technology-related borrowings in Spanish, 'tablet' and 'selfie', paying particular attention to the morphological, phonological and semantic factors that play a role in this process. We explain how these two words have been adopted and adapted by the Spanish language, and how various language institutions have attempted to establish policies to control or limit their use. In so doing, we demonstrate that sociolinguistic factors, such as the attitudes of Spanish language institutions vis-à-vis lexical borrowings from English, can contribute to understanding the phenomenon of the assignment of gender to Anglicisms in Spanish and their integration in the language.

Gender assignment strategies and L1 effects in the elicited production of mixed Spanish-Basque DPs

“…Finally, the individual variation regarding cues (analogical vs. phonological) could be interpreted as compatible with the less stable representation of Spanish gender, as suggested for Basque-dominant bilinguals by Caffarra et al (2017), as well as with the less stable "bilingual mode" (Grosjean, 1997). Nevertheless, the GAS tested in the current experimental study with frequent words is evidence for a very consistent gender agreement system, according to which Spanish Det agrees with every N, including the ones with "transitional" gender, as proposed for "recent" not-yet integrated English loanwords by Muñoz-Basols and Salazar (2019). Notice that the Basque nouns selected are words which are not(-yet) integrated into the Spanish variety spoken in the area, as compared to other words such as el BASERRI 'the farm' , los AITAS 'the parents' or other school related terms such as la ariketa 'the exercise' or el idazlan 'the essay' , which can be observed in the speech of monolingual Spanish speakers living in the area.…”

“…As illustrated in (7c) and (7d), many feminine nouns starting with a-like agua 'water' alternate between M and F determiners, quantifiers and demonstratives, but are consistently followed by F adjectives (Eddington & Hualde, 2008 Furthermore, variability has been found also in synonyms, cognates and lexical borrowings, which differ in gender across dialects of Spanish: e.g. el ordenador (Iberian Sp), el computador / la computadora (American Sp) 'the computer' , el / la tablet 'the tablet' , un /una selfie 'the selfie' (Muñoz-Basols & Salazar, 2019).…”

The analysis of youth-related anglicisms among Bosnian youth - knowledge of their original form and meaning and attitudes towards them

“…Almost similar conclusions also work for the Ukrainian language (Petryshyn, 2014). Furthermore, borrowings in the semantic domain of technology in the Spanish language are also evident due to their immediacy of integration (Muñoz-Basols & Salazar, 2019). However, one more extensive account of the analysis of anglicisms on this subject is found in Luján-García and García-Sánchez (2020), who made a review of IT anglicisms in five European languages, namely Italian, Portuguese, German, French, and Spanish.…”