When Spanish owns English words

Abstract

The English language and the Internet, both separately and taken together, are nowadays well-acknowledged as powerful forces which influence and affect the lexico-grammatical characteristics of other languages world-wide. In fact, many authors like Crystal (2004) have pointed out the emergence of the so-called Netspeak, that is, the language used in the Net or World Wide Web; as Crystal himself (2004: 19) puts it, ‘a type of language displaying features that are unique to the Internet […] arising out of its character as a medium which is electronic, global and interactive’. This ‘language’, however, may be differently understood: either as an adaptation of the English language proper to internet requirements and purposes, or as a new and rapidly-changing and developing language as a result of a rapid evolution or adaptation to Internet requirements of almost all world languages, for whom English is a trendsetter. If the second and probably most plausible interpretation is adopted, there are three salient features of ‘Netspeak’: (a) the rapid expansion of all its new linguistic developments thanks to the Internet itself, which may lead to the generalization and widespread acceptance of new words, coinages, or meanings, hundreds of times faster than was the case with the printed media. As said above, (b) the visible influence of English, the most prevalent language on the Internet. Consequently, (c) this new language tends to reduce the ‘distance’ between English and other languages as well as the ignorance of the former by speakers of other languages, since the ‘Netspeak’ version of the latter adopts grammatical, syntactic and lexical features of English. Thus, linguistic differences may even disappear when code-switching and/or borrowing occurs, as whole fragments of English appear in other language contexts. As a consequence of the new situation, an ideal context appears for interlanguage or multilingual word formation to thrive: puns, blends, compounds and word creativity in general find in the web the ideal place to gain rapid acceptance world-wide, as a result of fashion, coincidence, or sheer merit of the new linguistic proposals.

Social Networks: A Source of Lexical Innovation and Creativity in Contemporary Peninsular Spanish

“…First, they are English/Spanish hybrid terms, where an Anglicism combines with a native Spanish element, either an affix or a base, which, because of the semantic field of new technologies that they belong to, Munday (2015, p. 62) calls "cyberspanglish". Second, they are extremely innovative and creative, thus corroborating two of the main traits that, as stated earlier, distinguish the morphological and lexical levels of Internet language (Almela Pérez 1999;Crystal 2001;Balteiro 2012;Reyes and Jubilado 2012;Vettorel 2014).…”

“…There is no doubt that the World Wide Web, whose reference language is English (Edwards 1994;Beltrán Llevador 2000;Cronin 2003;Yus 2003;Hjarvard 2004;Danbolt Drange 2007;De la Cruz Cabanillas et al 2008;Kowner and Rosenhouse 2008;Balteiro 2011Balteiro , 2012Guerrero Ramos 2013;Vettorel 2014;Schmidt and Diemer 2015;García Andreva 2017;Vila Ponte 2018), has indeed played a crucial role in the meteoric rise of English in the world languages, since "[i]n recent decades, global communication depends largely on the Internet, as services such as e-mail and applications like Skype and instant-messaging services offered by multiple companies have revolutionized the way in which we communicate" (Reyes and Jubilado 2012, p. 43). Notice, in this regard, that, according to Kowner and Rosenhouse (2008, p. 7), "[a]bout 80% of Internet sites are in English, and most of the programming languages used are based on English".…”

“…The linguistic exchanges that are produced in the virtual world exhibit, furthermore, several particular features, usually referred to as e-grammar traits, that, as Baym (2010, p. 63) observes, make up "a mixed modality that combines elements of communication practices embodied in conversation and in writing" 3 . Therefore, it has to be considered a new language, which has been called Netspeak by Crystal (2001, p. 18), the most common distinguishing characteristics of which, widely studied in the literature (Crystal 2001;Baron 2003Baron , 2008Baym 2010;Androutsopoulos 2011;Herring 2012;Balteiro 2012;Thurlow 2012;Vettorel 2014;Yus 2017a), are the following ones 4 : (i) orthographically, it is described as being so full of contractions, abbreviations, acronyms, emoticons and emojis, repeated letters, capital letters with connotative meanings, punctuation marks with extremely creative uses, unconventional spellings and self-corrections that, according to Baron (2008, pp. 45-46), it should be considered the "written version of casual speech"; (ii) its most remarkable morphological and lexical traits are creativity and innovation, since it is packed with a huge number of new words formed by means of different word-formation processes, among which affixation, blending, acronymy, conversion and semantic shifts seem to be the most common ones; and (iii) finally, its syntax, filled with frequent omissions and incomplete clauses, as well as with colloquial constructions, is considered, on the one hand, "telegraphic and fragmented" (Herring 2012, p. 5) and, on the other, informal.…”

“…The first one is the development of new means of digital communication, in which the different social networks play a crucial role (Manovich 2001;Vaqueiro Romero 2012;Vila Ponte 2018). The second one is the impact of English, as the unanimously recognized lingua franca of the World Wide Web, on the other world languages (De Mooij 1994;Edwards 1994;Beltrán Llevador 2000;Cronin 2003;Yus 2003;Hjarvard 2004;Montes Fernández 2006;Danbolt Drange 2007;Kowner and Rosenhouse 2008;Balteiro 2011Balteiro , 2012Guerrero Ramos 2013;Vettorel 2014;Schmidt and Diemer 2015;García Andreva 2017).…”

“…Due to the interrelationship between these two facts, it is not surprising that social networks have become nowadays a very productive source of lexical innovation and creativity in English and in other (world) languages (Smyk-Bhattacharjee 2009;Balteiro 2012;Vila Ponte 2018). Through an exhaustive corpus-based study of the names of five well-known networking services-blog, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp-in Peninsular Spanish, this paper analyzes the neological Anglicisms derived from the names of the aforementioned social networking services, paying special attention to the following topics: (i) their date of introduction into the language; (ii) their frequency of occurrence; (iii) the diverse spellings they exhibit; (iv) and, finally, the different word-formation processes they undergo in this particular variety of Spanish.…”