Anglicisms in Spain: Gender Assignment and Plural Formation in Touristic Texts

Abstract

It is traditionally assumed that the influence of English upon Spanish is par- ticularly pervasive in the area of languages for specific purposes. In the case of the language of tourism it is more complicated than in other areas, as it covers several subfields, for example economics, history of art, marketing, sports, law, etc. We have carried out previous research on the presence of loanwords in tourism and computer language showing the increasing influence of English. The present study analyses the frequency and usage of anglicisms in the language of tourism in five different publications aimed at the general public, as well as web pages. Most of the articles and pages are related to adventure sports and rural tourism. In our analysis we examine their adaptation to the system in terms of gender assignment and plural formation to determine whether English loanwords in Spanish are governed by usual criteria regarding gender assignment. We shall see whether the English pattern prevails over the Spanish one or if there is a mix- ture of both methods. Finally, we will focus on the type of coinage that is derived once the item has been introduced in Spanish; some of the terms remain as sporadic code-switches, but others can be regarded as real borrowings that develop into derivatives or undergo other processes of word formation. This in mind, we have attempted to discover which seems to be the most common pro- cedure to fully integrate the borrowing into the Spanish system providing not only a qualitative analysis but also quantitative evidence from corpus-based driven data.

Keywords

• anglicisms
• touristic texts
• inflectional morphology
• borrowing integration