The Use of Loans in English in Spain and in America

Introduction

Spanish is the second most spoken language in the world preceded by Mandarin Chinese and followed by English (Fernández, 2016, p. 4). In 2016, more than 472 millions of people spoke Spanish as their first language and there were 567 millions of Spanish speakers. It means that 7.8% of the world population speaks Spanish (p. 4). It is difficult to estimate the exact number of speakers of any language or variety. The amount of speakers varies from one year to another and even from one month to next one. It means a constant change in studies and researches about the number of speakers of any language.

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The Spanish speaker community has been growing during decades and this language is not only spoken but has certain power in many countries. David Fernández Vítores, author of the article El español: una lengua viva, has elaborated a table in which he shows the number of Spanish speakers per country in which Spanish is not the official language. This table shows the number of native speakers and non-native speakers of Spanish in countries where Spanish is not the official language. The first column provides the name of the countries and the other two reflect the data. What calls everyone’s attention is the result obtained when dealing with the US. Although there some other high figures in areas such as Morocco and the European Union (except Spain), the US stands out in comparison to the others: there are 42,561,531 of native speakers and 14,954,051 of non-native speakers. The total number of Spanish native speakers is 45,785,587, but 42,451,531 out of this 45 millions of speakers live in the US. Therefore, the importance of Spanish in the US is noticeable.

Figure 1: Spanish speakers in countries where Spanish is not the official language. Adapted from “El español: una lengua viva”, by D. Fernández, 2016, Instituto Cervantes, p. 6-7.

The focus of the paper would be to compare the use of English loans or Spanish words between people living in America, both the US and South America and people living in Spain. We would carry out an interview to analyze the natural speech of participants and also a questionnaire with specific lexicon. The terms used in the research would be vocabulary that is used in the daily life in the Spanish language and the equivalent word that has been borrowed from English. Also, the research would analyze the context in which these loans would appear if so.

Literature review

–          Spanish in the US

According to J. Q. Adams and Peralie Strother-Adams (2001), the US is one of the richest nations in terms of ethnical diversity and multiculturalism due to massive immigration. There are different ethnicities, which entails the appearance of some minorities coexisting with the American population: Irish, Mexican and Chinese among others. The U.S Census Bureau released a summary which studied the racial and ethnic changes the U.S was living in 2010 and focused on the Hispanic population living in that nation: Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin, 2010 (Hume, Jones & Ramírez, 2011). According to this elaboration: “more than half of the growth in the total population of the United States between 2000 and 2010 was due to the increase in the Hispanic population” (p. 3). Hispanic population in the U.S (50.5 millions) meant 16% of the total population in the country in 2000, but it grew by 43% in 2010. While the Hispanic population was growing fast, the non-Hispanic population grew only a 5% during the decade (p. 3)

According to Roca & Lipski (1993), the term Hispanic population includes people from different nationalities that share the Spanish language. Instead of naming each minority by the country of origin they are all included under this term, which was described more than twenty years ago in the following terms:

The Hispanic population continues to be the largest and the fastest growing linguistic minority in the United States [ ] Spanish speakers in the United States come from different generations, nationalities, and cultures. The population also reflects varied levels of schooling, experience, economic power and status in the work force. Linguistically, this population includes a wide range of receptive and productive skills in English and Spanish. ( p. 2)

Language contact modifies languages and due to the number of Hispanic speakers in the US in the country, Spanish in the US has led to many changes both in language and culture. Also, because of the use of new technologies, communication between people has also suffered changes over the past years, this is also another form of language contact that has affect Spanish. Orlando Alba (2007) talks about the worries among researchers related to the possible deterioration of Spanish in the US and also in Spain due to the increasing use of English loans and most of all among the youth.

–          Loans from English in Spain and America

Language is made of all the vocabulary also known as lexicon. A language lexicon contains all the available terms in the specific language. However, there are other terms in other foreign languages that, because of language contact and the inclusion and regular use of them among speakers in their speech, they are finally borrowed  and included. These terms are known as loans and they can also suffer phonological and morphological modifications. F. Lázaro Carreter (1968) states that a loan is an element borrowed from a language and included in a different one by adaptation that could occur in two ways, imitation or transformation.

Jorge Marcía Arenas (2015) carried out a study in which he did not focus on the use of loans by Spanish speakers, but he analyzed loanterms. In his research, he studied Spanish media and commercials in order to see how foreign terms would be adapted morphologically and phonologically in Spanish. He gives examples such as “football” and “fútbol” which due to the phonological change when the word is used by Spanish speakers, there is also a orthographic variation or “scanner”, which in English would be produced as /ˈskӕnə/ whereas a Spanish speaker will modify it as /eskáneR/ and “escáner” in the written form; morphological changes, which would be the  case of “to google” that would turn into “googlear”; or terms that suffer phonological changes such as wi-fi, that can be produced as [wái.fái] or [gií.fi]. He also concludes asserting that loans happen due to the process of globalization and states that the areas that present a larger amount of borrowed words are fashion, sports, music and technology.

Linguistic Borrowings in the Current Spanish Language: Anglicisms, Arabisms, Gallicims, Italianisms and Latinisms, by Héctor Sánchez Mouriz (2015) consists of a research of common used terms borrowed from other foreign languages in Spanish. Regarding English words or Anglicisms, he used El Gran Diccionario de Uso del Español Actual. He divided the terms into different categories such as sports or food. Next, in each category, he gives the term in English, the phonological transcription, a definition and a sentence to see the word in a context. Here is an example (p. 50):

–         Box – [boks] – En un circuito automovilístico, zona en la que se instalan los servicios mecánicos de mantenimiento.

–          Fernando Alonso está ahora mismo en el box número 2 del circuito de Indianápolis.

Isabel de la Cruz and Cristina Tejedor (2012) studied the use of English loanwords in different specialized areas such as Tourism, Computer Science or Medicine. In their research, they analyzed, quantitative and qualitative, different corpus focused on the different disciplines, in Spanish. In their quantitative analysis, they counted the number of terms in each text in order to obtain percentages and also the variety of the terms. For example, for tourism, their results reported that airline magazines were among the resources studied, it ranked as the one with the most varied number of terms even though in quantity it is one of the lowest. As for the qualitative analysis, they analyzed how loans are inserted in sentences, for example, if they are written in cursive or in quotation marks, if they appear with the corresponding word in Spanish, if they present an explanation of the meaning, etc. They concluded the study reporting a clear influence of English upon Spanish and they state that “Spanish is not immune to the growing phenomenon of English as a global language. It is, indeed, a tendency that will certainly continue in the future” (p. 112).

In her research, Zentella (1982), studies the relationship between Spanish and English between Puerto Ricans. The focus of the paper is the analysis of speech in a group of Puerto Rican children aged between 6 and 12 years old who are raised in New York. She starts the research by giving some background of the sociopolitical context of Puerto Rico but the ultimate goal is to analyze the code-swithing between English and Spanish among the participants. The methodology consisted of an interview that was recorded. In this recordings, she stated that children would code-switch knowing both terms (loan term and Spanish word) and s/he produced both in different moments of the conversation, there were occasions in which it was not possible to say if the speaker knew both terms and also there was code-switch when the speaker did not know the word or did not remember it in one or the other way. She concluded by stating that the alternation between both languages occurred because participants did not know the word in the other language, to emphasize or to align roles (interviewer vs interviewee) (p.49). 

In her article, Silvia Betti (2018) focuses on Spanish in the United States and talks about the movement English-Only, which is a group that is against bilingual education, the diffusion of Spanish and fights for the English language or groups that want to conserve their Spanish as they consider it part of their identity. She also explains that many Hispanic parents want their kids to learn and speak only English as it is seen as a sign of success among the Latin community. However, as we have seen before, the presence of Spanish is undeniable as well as the continuos contact with English. In this regard, Ávalos, cited by Betti (2018), in the beginning of its presentation in the II International Congress of the Spanish language:

El otro día llame al rufero para que revisara el techo de mi casa porque había un liqueo. Toda la carpeta estaba empapada. Vino en su troca a wachear la problema y quería saber si yo iba a pagarle en cash o si lo iba a hacer la aseguranza. Después de contar cuántos tiles tenía que cambiar me dio un estimado. Yo le dije que me dejara el número de su celfon o de su biper. Si nadie contesta broder, me advirtió, deja un mensaje después de bip y yo te hablo p’atrás. (p.34)

This text is a representation of the normal speech of many Hispanics in the US in which we can find many examples of loans such as “wachear” instead of “watch”, “celfon” instead of “cellphone”, or “broder” instead of “brother”, “pagarle en cash” or “pay in cash”, among others.

The author focuses mainly in Spanglish and its history in the US and in her article, she explains the history of Spanish in the US and most of all, she presents a literature review centered around Spanglish. Betti does not mainly focus on borrowings, however, she mentions them as they are part of the system of this language variety and she cites different authors that give examples. In this regard, Torres, as cited by Betti (2018), also gathers other examples between Hispanic speakers in the US such as “yarda” instead of “yard”, “marqueta” replacing “market” or “carpeta” in place of “carpet” (p.41). She comes to the conclusion that the Spanish in the US has already been completely affected by the English but she remarks the importance of maintaining Spanish and the culture so the bilingualism does not disappear (p.49). 

Methodology

As we have seen, all the researches mentioned above study the use of loans in the Spanish language system in different ways, such as adaptations in the terms, appearance in different corpus from different resources and areas, etc. However, they do not compare the use of these loans between different types of speakers. That is the main goal of this paper would be to compare between Spanish speakers in Spain, Spanish speakers in the US and Spanish speakers from Latin-America. The methodology in this research would be both quantitative and qualitative. In order to carry out this study, participants would have to participate in a recording conversation and complete a questionnaire through Google Docs.

The recording would consist on a normal interview regarding daily life topics and personal life of the participants. It should be as natural as possible in order to register the possible or not use of loans of interviewees. Regarding the questionnaire, in the first part, participants would see a set of different pictures and they would have to say if they would use the Spanish term or the corresponding English loan (both words would be given), for example: “mouse” or “ratón” or  “email” or “correo electrónico”, among others. They would also have the option of choosing both depending on the context in which they would be, but in this case, they would have to explain in which context they would use one or another. The second part of the survey would be a set of questions related to their use of Spanish and English in their daily life and their relationship to people that speak English or Spanish, such as context or approximate amount of time. This data would be analyzed along with their choices in the first part (loan terms) in order to see if the amount of use of language or another affects the participants lexical. It would be necessary to carry out the interview before the questionnaire so participants would not be bias during their natural speech.

As for the participants, they would be divided in five different groups: Spanish speakers living in Spain, Heritage Spanish speakers living in the US, speakers from South America living in the US, Spanish speakers from Spain living in the US and speakers living in South America. Gathering the information of these different types of participants would allow to study the differences in the use of loans between the different varieties of Spanish and analyze how the contact between languages would also affect the choice of vocabulary.

References

Adams, J. Q. & Strother-Adams, P. (2001). Dealing With Diversity: an Anthology. Chicago: Kendall/Hunt.

Alba, O. (2007). The phonetic and morphological integration of loanwords: a study of the vocabulary of baseball in dominican Spanish. Revista de Lingüística Teórica y Aplicada, 45 (2), pp. 89-109.

Betti, S. (2011). El spanglish en los Estados Unidos: ¿estrategia expresiva legítima? Lenguas Modernas, 37, pp. 33-53. Retrieved from https://revistas.uchile.cl/index.php/LM/article/view/30687/32443

De la Cruz, I. & Tejedor, C. (2012). Email or correo electrónico? Anglicisms in Spanish. Revista Española de lingüística aplicada. Volumen monográfico, 1, pp. 95-117.

Fernández, D. (2016). El español: una lengua viva. Informe 2016. Instituto Cervantes. Retrieved from http://www.cervantes.es/imagenes/File/prensa/EspanolLenguaViva1 6.pdf Lázaro,

Humes, K., Jones, N., & Ramirez, R. (2011). Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin, 2010: 2010 Census Brief. US Census Bureau. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf

Lázaro, F. (1968): Diccionario de términos filológicos. Madrid: Gredos.

Sánchez, H. (2015). Linguistic Borrowings in the Current Spanish Language: Anglicisms, Arabisms, Gallicims, Italianisms and Latinisms. International Journal of Language and Linguistics, 2 (1), pp. 41-53. Retrieved from http://ijllnet.com/journals/Vol_2_No_1_March_2015/5.pdf

Roca, A., & Lipski, J. M. (Eds). (1993). Spanish in the United States: Linguistic Contact and Diversity. New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter.

Zentella, A. C. (1982). Spanish and English in contact in the United States: The Puerto Rican experience. Word, 33 (1-2), pp. 41-57. Retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00437956.1982.11435721?needAccess=true