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.
