Present-day Spanish fashion lexicon dresses up in English

• Beatriz Rodríguez Arrizabalaga ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidad de Huelva

     Universidad de Huelva

     Huelva, España

     
• Localización: Alicante Journal of English Studies / Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses: RAEI, ISSN-e 2171-861X, ISSN 0214-4808, Nº. 30, 2017 (Ejemplar dedicado a: English as a Contact Language: Variation and Diffusion / coord. por José Antonio Sánchez Fajardo, Ignacio M. Palacios Martínez), págs. 239-276
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • 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.