Are we becoming bilinguals in an overlapped way?

It is well known that the Globalization process, largely is an Americanization of the world, which has received a considerable boost with the undeniable fact that, today, the US is the only global superpower. In this sense, Leopoldo Saez points out that  the American way of life has become a very desirable model; all young people wear jeans and T-shirts with slogans in English. Mostly, they are rockers, rappers, punkies and techno lovers. Moreover, they  eat "sandwiches ", "hot dogs" and "hamburgers".
All this influence has had a profound impact on the lexicon of music, sports,
economy, computing and technology in general. Even, our alcohol culture has been radically transformed. English has reshaped our traditional habits, cornering increasingly "the chicha", the wine and  "the pipeño" widely tasted in "cantinas". But, we no longer drink in "cantinas", they have been replaced by "pubs" and "bars", in which "the barmans" delight with their "Piscos sour" that are usually drunk during the  "happy hours" when those are cheaper. We can also taste "cocktails" or "combined", long drinks such as "gin" or" "tonic with gin" and "Manhattans". There are varieties for everyone; "Tom Collins" , "Whiskey", "brandy" or "rum" for gentlemen; "cherry" and "sours", for ladies.

In another field, we got used to the idea that "Lady Gaga", the new "queen of
pop", famous for her daring music and her "sexy" and glamorous "look", has reached the "top" of the "rankings" with her latest "hits", which sound in every "discotheque" where "Djs" make "remixes" of her "CDs" and "DVDs" to please the energic "fans" who dance lively "on the floor"

English is producing an accelerated process of renewal and growth of our lexicon in both the surface plane of linguistic forms and the deepest of content. Science and technology are increasingly being developed in English and our culture is not prepared to adapt or create new lexical terms for those new words. Hence, in many cases, Chilean people incorporate Anglicisms because of the lack of equivalent to express this "new way of life". They use them because they need them.

I've share a song by El cuarteto de nos, which illustrates how anglicisms are inserted in our Latin American Spanish.  See you next week!!

The geography of Anglicisms: Different meaning and acceptance in Latin America.

 An study carried out by Haensch (2005) revealed that the geographic distribution of anglicisms, their meanings and their different acceptances in Spain and Latin America seem to be arbitrary. Haensch presented a short list of anglicisms which are frequently used in Latin American Spanish. The information about these units was obtained by native informants and lexicographical sources. It has shown that in those countries where there is less contact with the US, the loanwords are morphologically and phonetically adapted into the Spanish system. On the contrary, in the countries where the US’ influence is stronger (Mexico, Caribe and Chile) the anglicisms are adopted without any adaptation. In the case of Chile, the study showed that some anglicisms are used in an elliptic and truncated way; the most common are the representation of English adjectives as subjects in Spanish (e.g scotch for scotch tape, shopping for shopping center, living for living room, camping for camping site). Another observation given was the fact that many brand names are commonly used as proper names to refer to certain products or things, for example: Quaker instead of oatmeal, scotch instead of sticky tape or gillette and confort instead of razor and toilet paper respectively. Finally, it can be observed that some anglicisms have their own acceptance in each country; for example, in Chile instead of saying "plomero" for plumber as the rest of the Latin American do, we use the Anglicism gásfiter, which means "gas- filter". Although it doesn´t make sense, there are evidence that in some regions of Peru, people use the word "gasfitero", which is an adaptation of the Chilean Anglicism. Therefore, the Anglicism has its own linguistic geography in the wide Spanish world.

            As a final inference, nowadays we can observe this evidence on the WEB. 2.0; it is more and more common for Chilean people to use just the word "face" to refer to "Facebook". Hence, if you are a native speaker of English and someone tells you that s/he of going to contact you through "face", s/he means through a facebook profile.

Welcome!

This blog is aimed to explain a linguistic phenomenon called Anglicism. It is defined as a lexical borrowing that comes from anglophone countries, mainly from England (After de Industrial Revolution) and the United States (After the WW2). In Chile, the Anglicisms rank second in the list of lexical exportation, reason why many scholars have paid attention to this phenomenon, trying to deliberate its use, causes and effects as well as the pros and cons that that it may have in the language estructure of our region.