Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos (Jun 2023)
Iberian-Romance borrowings into English in the fortified wine industry: Implications for wine educators
Abstract
English tends to be regarded as sufficient for communication in numerous fields. This includes industries whose progress has been reliant on communication in languages other than English, in which English has been useful in matters of trade. A notable example is the microfield of fortified wines, where primary languages include Portuguese (madeira and port) and Spanish (sherry), with English being historically significant, as evident from English documents. With the English corpus showing unassimilated borrowings from the Iberian-Romance languages, and with prestigious wine schools, such as AWRI, the Napa Valley Wine Academy, WSET, to name a few, offering their students little opportunity to learn these languages, it seemed reasonable to provide numerical evidence of the presence of these borrowings in professional communication in English to see if potential comprehension problems among students, resulting from professional discourse being filled with foreign words and expressions may be significant. The (corpus-driven) study of concept systems in the areas of madeira, port and sherry has led to the creation of detailed English-language models containing loanwords from Portuguese and Spanish in varying proportions. The models have been explored to demonstrate to what extent English may be considered as sufficient for (effective) communication in each of the areas of the fortified wine industry, and, by the same token, dependent on borrowings from the industry’s primary languages. The established numbers of loanwords in the descriptions of madeira, port and sherry have indicated the degree to which wine students can rely on their knowledge of English for communication in their target professions while revealing their potential needs for Portuguese and Spanish. These findings inform applied language sciences on the scale of borrowings one could expect in professional discourse of an important sector of the wine industry from the field’s primary languages, with Spanish identified as a relatively more productive source of unassimilated borrowings than Portuguese. The results provide an insight for educational programme developers to consider the inclusion of Portuguese and Spanish classes in professional curricula prepared for students pursuing degrees in winemaking and related fields who have chosen the specialization of fortified wines.
