Linguística (Jan 2008)
L'utilisation des anglicismes dans la langue du sport en français et leur variation
Abstract
For the past few years, the Roman languages have evolved a lot. The globalization of exchanges triggered a contact between them and social and technological transformations infered a linguistic change: globalization shows itself in all sectors and as a result it cannot leave the vocabulary unchanged. New words are necessary to express social changes. In this study, I am interested in what takes place from a linguistics’ perspective in the field of sports: the narrow relationships between French and English speakers have led to a strong development of English terms in the French language. Anglicisms in the field of sports take a more and more important part in our society. For a few decades, the world of sports has changed: more and more sportsmen are professional, and mass-media play an important role in sports broadcasting. On the one hand, the language of sports is changing, on the other hand the use of words belonging to the sports area goes beyond the scope of sports activities. However, not all speakers have the same way of speaking. As a consequence, the knowledge and / or the use of such or such lexe contributes to stress the feeling of belonging to a social category: Anglicisms are not used by the members of the same community the same way. Through to this report, I wanted to analyse in which way the linguistic change expresses itself in the field of sports. First, I have made an empirical investigation, gathering lexes in sports newspaper L’Équipe. The choice of a newspaper can be discussed but two elements led to my choice: the history of the newspaper shows more than one century of report directed towards sports, and sales figures show that it is the most read newspaper in France. The gathering of the corpus took place during the Summer Olympics Games in Athens 14-30 August 2004; I studied 220 lexes referred to as “anglicisms” and dated them. This dating allows a diachronic description of these lexes. Then, I did a sociolinguistic survey among 250 people spread over all the French territory. Taking into consideration social variables, this allowed me to describe the particularities that rule the language experience of speakers, in order to assess to what extent the presence of anglicisms in sports and in other field of activities is related to these variables
