Historical Sociolinguistics and Sociohistorical Linguistics

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The impact of lexical anglicisms in Spanish film magazines: a case study across time1

(print instructions)

Trinidad Guzmán González (contact)

University of León (Spain) 

 

Submitted May 2002, published: August 2003 (HSL/SHL 3)

 

Introductory remark         

The present article, which has been specifically designed for electronic publication, is complemented by three glossaries, which can be accessed in two ways:

  1. double-clicking on marked words will directly take the reader to the word in the relevant glossary

  2. double-clicking on each item in the following list will take the reader to the beginning of the glossary in question:
    1. Glossary 1984
    2. Glossary 1999–2001
    3. Glossary with words in common.

By clicking on “back” in the browser menu, the reader will return to the original place in the article itself.

Each of the three glossaries contains a list of the anglicisms which constitute the basis for this study – presented according to whether they are part of a previous analysis carried out in 1984 (Guzmán 1984), of an analysis carried out between 1999 and 2001, or to a combination of them. In all three glossaries, the entries contain the following information:

  • the definition of the word, except in very transparent expressions; the source from which the word has been obtained (a list of abbreviations at the end of this article will explain the various sources used)
  • an illustration of the word in context. The relevant word appears in bold; other anglicisms appearing in the same text have been capitalized, though I have restricted this to anglicisms appearing in any of my three glossaries.
  • Information regarding two dictionaries (of the several employed for this study): the Diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua Española (DRAE) as the authoritative Spanish lexicographical work in discussions on norms, usage, prescription and authority; and Görlach’s Dictionary of European Anglicisms (DEA) as a pioneering survey study. The inclusion of the word is marked by the relevant acronym at the end of the entry; in the case of DEA, a figure showing the number of languages (out of the sixteen surveyed in the Dictionary) where it has been attested.

1. Introduction

It is perhaps one of the most well-known commonplaces to comment on the huge influence of the English language, as a reflex of the dominating Anglophone culture of our times, on the languages of the rest of the world, and, especially, on those of the so-called “Western world”2. This influence seems more pervasive in the field of lexis than in any other area of language and, as far as Spanish is concerned, it provokes all sorts of reactions, many of which are unfavourable. Not all reactions, however, come from laymen, though linguists, in general, tend to adopt cautious and more balanced attitudes.3

Most of the complaints are based on general impressions obtained after having listened to the news on the radio or on television, or having read a newspaper or a magazine. It cannot be denied that the presence of English is pervasive and obvious in all these media. For linguists, nevertheless, evidence must come from data gathered objectively, and they must set aside patriotic indignation (or an enthusiastic welcome for novelties). Such studies, however, are not as frequent as the lamentations, although they do exist (e.g. Gómez Capuz 20004). Recently, computers, with their capacity for handling massive amounts of data and texts, have provided invaluable help in undertaking large-scale analyses on the subject in question, besides having opened new fields in this respect.

The present paper concerns a specific type of English influence (“lexical anglicisms”, Sp. “anglicismos léxicos”) from a particular kind of texts (film magazines) on a particular dialectal variety of Spanish (non-extraterritorial Spanish, the variety spoken in Spain, an obvious choice for a non-specialist in Spanish studies) and a particular time-span (1981-2001). The research for this paper was carried out in two phases, the first in the early 1980s, a time when computing facilities were not yet generally available; the results of this first phase have been reported in Guzmán (1984, 1986). The second phase of the project was begun nearly twenty years later. I was thus able to carry out a real-time study of the influx of English loanwords into Spanish despite what in retrospect seem unfortunate shortcomings in the original study,5 and to test the final statement made in Guzmán (1984:304), i.e. “Es imposible saber si “blade runner” se convertirá en una figura tan arquetípica como un “sheriff” o si la técnica del “slit scan” será pronto sustituida por otras que la superarán ... El tiempo será el que se encargue de resolverlo”.6

 

2. Preliminary considerations

Defining the concept of “anglicism” is no easy matter. As a starting point I have taken the information provided in the 2001 edition of Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy of Language (DRAE), because, along with the Real Academia itself, it is constantly referred to in discussions regarding anglicisms and the influence of English on Spanish in general, both by linguists and laymen. The dictionary defines the term anglicism as follows:  

Anglicismo. Giro o modo de hablar propio de la lengua inglesa. 2. Vocablo o giro de esta lengua empleado en otra. 3. Empleo de vocablos o giros ingleses en distintos idiomas.7

Of related interest are the terms barbarismo, extranjerismo and neologismo:

Barbarismo. Extranjerismo incorporado totalmente al idioma.8

Extranjerismo. (...) Voz, frase o giro que un idioma toma de otro extranjero.9

Neologismo. 1. Vocablo, acepción o giro nuevo en una lengua. 2. Uso de estos vocablos o giros nuevos.10

An “anglicismo” is, therefore, a “neologism”, that is to say, an innovation in the Spanish language whose source is a foreign language (“extranjerismo”), i.e. English. Apart from the lexicon, also phonology, morphology and syntax are subject to foreign influences, so that, in a wide sense, we could speak of syntactic, morphological, and phonological anglicisms as well. Examples of these are:

a) the increase in frequency of passive constructions; thus according to Casado Velarde (1992:12):  

“Se percibe desde hace algún tiempo un uso creciente de la pasiva en el lenguaje periodístico. La agencia Efe advierte a sus redactores que eviten la traducción mecánica de muchas pasivas inglesas por pasivas castellanas, con el sujeto en cabeza, como, por ejemplo, “Un crédito ha sido votado por el Congreso para los damnificados”. La lengua estándar prefiere “Ha sido votado por el Congreso un crédito para los damnificados”, y más aún la activa”.11 

b)  the productivity of the suffix “-ing” as in “puenting”. This word

“... is firmly established in the language and would be recognized by the majority of speakers with the meaning of the activity of jumping from a bridge attached to an elastic cord (English “bungee jumping”), although for some speakers it is also associated to the practice of not going to work or to school the day in between two holidays, thus creating a long weekend, known in Spanish as “puente” (bridge)” (Mora 2000). 

What is really interesting here is the fact that sensu stricto this usage is a Gallicism, since, according to various authors in Görlach (2002), it initially originated in French (Humbley 2002:52) and extended from there to other European languages such as Dutch (Berteeloot & Van der Sijs 2002:26) or Norwegian (Graedler 2002:29).

c)  certain accentual patterns and anglicised pronunciations; thus, according to Casado-Velarde (1992:8):  

“En la pronunciación de extranjerismos léxicos – anglicismos, sobre todo -, y de nombres propios extranjeros, tanto geográficos como personales, así como de siglas, con fonología ajena a los hábitos articulatorios hispanos, se tiende a respetar más que antes el consonantismo exótico: conservación de consonantes finales y grupos de consonantes, etc.: “handicap, scanner, trust, sandwich” ...”.12  

See also Alonso-Gallo (1996:284): “De esta manera, también desde el plano fonético, se filtra el anglicismo y obtenemos novedades como /aftersún/, /líftin/, /aftershéiv/, /cámpin/, /récor/, /set/, /yet/, /biútiful pípol/, /chérman/, /mánayer/, /elepé/, /láser/, /pak/, y un largo etcétera”.13

For my study, I selected what is generally known as “lexical anglicisms” (Sp. “anglicismos léxicos”), i.e. “la influencia ejercida por la lengua inglesa en el terreno del vocabulario (o componente léxico) de una lengua, con variadas manifestaciones (puede incorporar nuevos significados en la lengua receptora, matiza o añade otros ya existentes, calca expresiones en su forma ...” (Medina, 1996:20).14 More precisely, I focused on just one of these: English single words (at most two or three words or expressions that have been lexicalised, i.e. compounds such as split screen), which occur fully integrated in Spanish texts. They may have been either completely (filmar) or partly (gánster) adapted to Spanish spelling and grammatical rules, or not at all. This last type is what Lorenzo (1987:23) calls “anglicismos crudos” (“raw anglicisms”). Derived words with English bases (hitchcockiano) and Spanish suffixes were also included, but, in principle, loan translations15 or calques such as director artístico for art director were not considered, with just a few exceptions, such as ciencia ficción, animación, and nominar/nominación. These particular words are so relevant for the world of the cinema that no discussion on the influence of English on Spanish would be complete without them.

I have the impression that, in the long run, syntactic or morphological anglicisms might be more influential in the evolution of Spanish than loanwords. However, vocabulary is the most obvious mirror of culture, including, of course, contact between communities and, consequently, innovations of all kinds. Words mirror innovations almost immediately, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage: an advantage, because cultural paths and references can be quite easily traced, and a disadvantage because vocabulary is the least stable part of a language. New words appear every day, whether borrowed or invented, but only part of them remain long enough to be reasonably observed. This, however, should not be a problem for a language historian working with relatively wide spans of time in the past. But when studying contemporary stages of a language, predictions, even very tentative ones, become more difficult since we lack an adequate perspective for doing so.

In the case of English, and if we compare English with other languages which had a strong influence on the Spanish language in the past (notably Arabic and French), the story of the alleged “lexical invasion” is only just beginning: Arabic can safely be considered as an adstratum to Spanish in so far as it was natively spoken in Spain for eight centuries during the Middle Ages. The lexical deposit it made in Spanish is considerable and encompasses a wide variety of lexical fields. As for French, it was by far the most predominant second language taught in Spanish primary and secondary schools only twenty years ago, and it had been so for centuries. Its significance can easily be gauged by the fact that the first translations of Shakespeare’s works into Spanish were made from French rather than directly from the original. Another illustration may be provided by the enrolment figures for the Degree in General Philology in the University of León: in the year 1979, there were seventy students who studied French as a second language as against fourteen students of English. In the last two decades, the situation has changed completely, in obvious connection with historical developments. These developments, on the other hand, only partly explain certain differences in the number, dates and routes of the integration of anglicisms in European Spanish as compared with American Spanish and with other European languages. The hegemony of the United States after the Second World War and the subsequent importance and diffusion attained by English was less noticeable in Spain than elsewhere. The isolation of the country from many cultural, technological and other developments of the Western world was reflected in the lexicon, which, in spite of some apocalyptical complaints (cf. Medina 1996:17-18), imported far fewer English than French items. After Franco’s death in 1975, a flood of anglicisms of all kinds became clearly perceptible in the mass media in obvious connection with the subsequent changes experienced in Spain. My analysis compares the beginning of this development with a period of, at least culturally and politically, greater stability since the end of the Franco dictatorship. But the question of whether my findings for the past twenty years will allow us to make any predictions as to what may happen in the future (cf. Lass 1997:330) is uncertain. For the moment, we should explore the evidence at our disposal, and wait.

 

3. The analysis      

The main reason for selecting the field of research of the present paper is the fact that the world of films (Sp. “cinematografía”) is a very important source of neologisms in any language, and Spanish is no exception. Films are, undoubtedly, the most characteristic art manifestation of the twentieth century, as well as the most popular and far reaching compared to any other kind of influence. Furthermore, if we consider financing and business, the film industry has always been basically an English-speaking, or rather American, phenomenon.16 Because of the importance of this industry as far as distribution, investments, and box office revenues are concerned, Hollywood has contributed to modern mythologies in a very significant way: there are probably very few people who can claim never to have heard of cowboys, Dracula, gangsters, spaceships or Mickey Mouse. In Spain, certainly, films from English-speaking countries,17 are still a very important medium through which we get to know about other countries.    

As far as the Spanish language is concerned, only pop music, sports, computer technology and, recently, the financial world equate or perhaps surpass the film industry in the introduction of anglicisms. Among them, possibly only sports has an audience of a scope comparable to that of films, generally amplified by what could be regarded as its sequel, television. (The audience scope of pop music tends to be restricted by age, and that of finance mainly by socio-educational factors.) English words related to the world of cinema have entered Spanish via many channels. My study focuses on the written medium, and more specifically on the language of film magazines. But as the mass media, and among them the genre of the film magazine, represent one of the “areas” where speech and writing most often meet and interact,18 even specialised magazines may be considered to be an avenue through which many neologisms enter the language. This mediating role is thus signalled in Chris Pratt’s remarks (1980:224-225) on the three stages anglicisms undergo in their incorporation to the receiving language:

  1. original Spanish technolect, very much influenced by English

  2. the media, with a crucial diffusing activity

  3. the average speaker.

As will be shown below, part of this development could be regarded as an example of what in historical sociolinguistics is called “change from above” , i.e. conscious change.

The magazines I have analysed in both phases of my research are not periodicals for the professional but they are aimed at the general public interested in films and the cinema. As a consequence, these published materials are general in scope and enjoy wide circulation, thus reaching large numbers of readers. In 1981, there were four such periodicals in Spain: Fotogramas, Dirigido Por, Papeles de Cine Casablanca and Contracampo. The first two appeared monthly, as indeed they still do today; Papeles de Cine Casablanca and Contracampo used to come out less regularly. That is why my analysis included fifty issues altogether, covering these four magazines as they came out in the years 1981, 1982 and the first nine months of 1983. The anglicisms employed in them were registered and listed in a database which came to comprise approximately 230 items, including compounds and derivations. Of these magazines, only the first two are still published, and for the second phase of my research I analysed the issues for the years 1999, 2000 and the first nine months of 2001. Since the early eighties, new film magazines have entered the market, and to supplement my data I selected two of them with similar circulation and scope: Cinemanía and Interfilms.

As for the kind of lexical anglicisms studied, I concentrated only on words and expressions relating to films in as wide a sense as possible, thus excluding e.g. weekend and hotdog. The words I found can be subdivided into the following categories:

  1. technical language, such as types of cameras (dolly), illuminating techniques (blue backing), sound (soundtrack); visual effects (Zoptic), specific jobs (cameraman, script)
  2. words related to marketing, distribution, awards and publicity, such as blind booking, Oscar and Festival
  3. film genres, such as western and biopic
  4. artistic movements, such as Free Cinema, Underground and New Wave
  5. words relating specifically to the film industry, such as star system and vamp
  6. words that were not coined by or first appeared in the world of cinematography, but whose popularity is due basically to it - consequently being their main way of entrance in the Spanish language, such as sheriff, gangster, maccarthismo, glamour
  7. words containing the stem “film”: film, filmación, filmar, filmografía, filmoteca, telefilm.

On the one hand, both frequent, productive words (script, Oscar ...) and infrequent terms (Zoptic, blind booking ...) can be found in every one of these categories; on the other, it stands to reason that category 1, for instance, should contain an smaller number of words unfamiliar to the average speaker than category 6 (or vice versa). A specific group for “film” and its derivations appears to be justified by the results shown in the frequency index included in my 1984 analysis. It was based upon a sample of ten issues from the four magazines analysed. It showed that the word film had the highest frequency rate, with 1261 occurrences, whereas the second most frequent word was its derivate filmografía, with 207 occurrences. Though the word film competes with Spanish pelicula, it is still more frequent than its native counterpart, and it was officially accepted in 1992 by the Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy (21st ed.). It is interesting to note that the variant filme had been accepted twenty-two years previously. Despite this, people in the1980s never spoke of “filmes”, using “pelicula” instead (Quilis 1984:413-423 proved that was the case, explicitly mentioning specialised magazines and professionals, and even today the spoken language appears to favour the native word to the loanword). A recent study on anglicisms in colloquial spoken Spanish, (Gómez Capuz 2000:65-67) proves this point quite conclusively: none of the 66 appearances in his corpus is “film”, the only word being “película” or the clipped form “peli”.

An interesting development can be observed in the written language as represented by the periodicals analysed, which is that the use of pelicula is on the increase – even the clipped form is making its appearance when authors choose to shift into a more colloquial register in their articles or reviews. This could perhaps be interpreted as an attempt, possibly a conscious one, to counteract what is experienced as a detrimental influence on the native language. It cannot be foreseen, though, whether this will counteract other factors which clearly favour the presence of “film(e)” in these magazines.19 Apart from the obvious need of synonyms for frequently mentioned items, these kind of periodicals are obviously also subject to material conditions such as space and typography. They are generally profusely illustrated with many good quality colour pictures – which generally increases the production costs. Although text might not perhaps be overtly viewed as of secondary importance, the fact that película is exactly double in length to film must surely be taken into account in the composition and layout of the text, which is an important consideration when the word appears more than twenty times on a page.20

The last positions in the frequency index are occupied by technical words. This is to be expected, in the first place because some have never moved from the technolect into the general standard and secondly because the general scope of the magazines in my analysis precludes a massive presence of articles on and references to technical matters, where such words appear more often. On the contrary, film critiques, interviews with actors and directors, discussions of periods and genres, or the yearly report on the Academy Awards, popularly known as Oscars, form the bulk of these publications. Words stemming from this major event, such as nominar, nominación, are, incidentally, not only very widely used, but also among the most pervasive, most enduring in the language. In addition, the word “Oscar” has given rise to the derivation oscarizar, which demonstrates the extent to which the word has been integrated into the Spanish language, as the English equivalent *to oscarise, “nominate for an Oscar”, is non-existent. This is a good example of what has been termed a “pseudo-loan” (Görlach 2002:53), a phenomenon which, like most aspects of anglicisms today, repeats itself in many European languages.21

More points worth commenting on are the following: my 1984 study contained 242 anglicisms. 91 of these can also be found in 2001. The total number of anglicisms for my second study is 165. This, of course, means that 151 appear exclusively in my 1984 study whereas 74 have been recorded only in the 2001 material and can hence most probably be regarded as new additions. One possible explanation for the different figures between my original study and the second phase of my study is that not all periodicals have been analysed yet. While this remains to be done, it is interesting to comment on those loanwords that have evidently remained in the language for twenty years. Of these, the highest number of occurrences are the following:

  1. technical words: Cinemascope (scope), voz en off, tráiler, travelling, vídeo, zoom, flash back, sketch, spot
  2. words related to marketing, distribution, awards and publicity: festival, major, nominación, nominar, Oscar, oscarizar, hollywoodiense, remake
  3. film genres: biopic, cartoon, ciencia ficción, musical, road movie, suspense, thriller, western
  4. artistic movements: Free Cinema, Underground
  5. words relating specifically to the film industry: gag, hitchcockiano, casting, extra, fan, rol, starlet, star system
  6. words that were not coined by or that first appeared in the world of cinematography, but whose popularity is due basically to it: cowboy, detective, gangster, sheriff, maccarthismo, glamour, sex symbol, sexy
  7. words containing the stem “film”: film, filmación, filmar, filmografía, filmoteca, telefilm.

It looks as though most of these words are in Spanish to stay, precisely because they belong to new realities that have been introduced in the Spanish world. In this same respect, another significant fact is that some words present in the 1984 corpus were no longer attested in my second analysis: producer, production designer, stunt have been substituted by the corresponding loan translations, i.e. productor, diseñador de producción, especialista. Some interesting newcomers are indie, animatronic and gore, which refer to new realities in the world of cinema. The fate of these words will be bound to the question of whether the innovations themselves will remain to stay. The same can be said of derived adjectives from new film directors' names, such as tarantiniano.  

 

3.  Discussion

The explanations for the use of loan words in the type of magazine analysed fall within the province of (historical) sociolinguistics perhaps more than any other aspect of the phenomenon of anglicisms. Lexical borrowing is one of the most common outcomes of language contact along history – which, as has been noted above, should perhaps been viewed as contact between language users in a wide sense. Most of the reasons discussed below can be universally found in the history of languages – differences existing only as to detail (such as proportions, diffusion media) but not in essence.22 Particular reasons concerning film magazines do not differ from those which could be given for other specialist publications whose field of interest stems from the English-speaking world, and they have not changed much – at least in the course of the last fifteen years or so. In addition, a combination of several motives, if not all of them, may operate at the same time. The most important ones are the following:

  1. the difficulty or impossibility of finding Spanish equivalents. This is particularly so in three cases:
    1. technical vocabulary: this category comprises a significant number of the total anglicisms found, since the adaptation of the original word for a foreign device, technique or procedure is the most frequent way to build up technical vocabularies. In Spain, film and television came from abroad, and, consequently, the Spanish lexicon had to adapt itself. The need for accuracy often leads to the direct introduction of the anglicism, as in the case of travelling and blue-backing.  
    2. words denoting people, things, situations and the like which simply did not exist in the Spanish world, and of which no translation would render the real meaning: sheriff is one of the clearest cases.
    3. trade marks: legal regulations tend to be quite explicit as to the use of these names; some, on the other hand, have become extraordinarily popular, entering expressions like soñar en Technicolor (“to have dreams in Technicolor”): Eastmancolor, Panavisión, Cinemascope, Technicolor.  
  1. problems in the translation of anglicisms into Spanish. Generally the result would be a long paraphrase, which, as has been observed above, tends to be avoided in printed materials where space is scarce. A good example is slapstick, the type of film comedy in which falling down, beating and pie throwing are the basic triggers in making the audience laugh. Comedia de caídas y trompazos would be too long. Similar examples would be drive in and underground, for which it would be well-nigh impossible to find translations of comparable length.  
  2. pragmatic reasons, most of which would be applicable to journalistic language in general, and some to general Spanish usage. Several of them seem particularly relevant to Spanish film magazines. More than discrete categories, they constitute a cline of attitudinal tendencies, the most outstanding of which are the following:  
    1. stylistic reasons: the anglicism is employed deliberately, to refer to specific issues. An example is the following:

(1) Thorndike se lanza en paracaídas para combatir al final de “Caza del hombre” y en “Hangmen also die!”. Al eterno “the end” se le añade un honrado “not”. (DP, 103, p. 60)23

Alternatively, it serves to highlight the unmistakeably Anglo-Saxon origin of a film or performance, as in:

(2) Aquellos héroes de Hollywood nos sacaban treinta centímetros por cápita y película, además de pasarse los noventa minutos ridiculizando a los del Eje y llevarse en el happy end a la protagonista de oro y mirada verde. (CA, 1, p. 4)24

    1. habit, from which it is not easy to escape, and which is perhaps more in evidence in specialised magazines than in the general press. This habit prevents translation into Spanish of items like star system or Free Cinema, which tend to be so strongly rooted in the speaker’s mind that *sistema de estrellas would sound peculiar. In the case of *Cine Libre this could even lead to confusion. It must be remembered that the magazines analysed do not specifically address specialists – but do not address the general reader either. Their audience are “aficionados”, cinemagoers, who are used to the world of cinema and precisely to that type of vocabulary. And by recognizing an English expression star system or studio system, true “aficionados” identify themselves as members of a specific community. But see below, 3.d.
    2. related to this is what may be called “cinematographic purism” (“purismo cinematográfico”): one could say historia de amor for love story or intriga for suspense and there are indeed some subtle differences in meaning between the Spanish and the English words. Insistence on using English expressions might clearly lead into the following motive: 
    3. plain snobbery, which seems particularly related to the idiosyncrasy of this type of magazine: writers deliberately employ words such as box office, cast, performance, take and stunt man, despite the fact that these words have exact equivalents in Spanish, i.e. taquilla, reparto, actuación and especialista. Worse still, the Spanish word is the better known of the two, and would be most frequently employed in general usage. As in the case of the motive listed in 3b, the writer uses the anglicisms to identify with a specific group. The correlation of this usage with “insiderness”25 (cf. Battarbee 2002:265) seems to be a type of behaviour to which journalists are particularly prone, according Lázaro-Carreter (1997:20-21): “Muchas veces, los desvíos obedecen al deseo de mostrar con el habla la pertenencia a determinado grupo ...; con mucha frecuencia acontece eso en los profesionales de la comunicación, hasta el punto de haberse creado una jerga que muchos juzgan imprescindible usar como seña de identidad y que, actuando centrífugamente, acaba influyendo en el uso general ...”.26 The danger of such pedantry is, of course, that the intended audience are sometimes unable to understand what they are reading.

While the question whether “pseudo-loans” (see above) would fit into this last tendency is debatable, happy end is worth commenting on as perhaps the best-known example of this kind of “back-translation” not only in Spanish, but in many of the languages covered by the recent Dictionary of European Anglicisms.27 Lorenzo (1996:585) points at a French origin for this:  

Un final feliz es la traducción literal de lo que franceses y españoles creen que se dice en inglés happy end, acostumbrados a ver películas de origen anglosajón que terminan con la despedida “The End” y así lo escriben a menudo. El propio Robert Angl. declara que es una errónea adaptación al francés del americanismo happy ending, perteneciente a la jerga del cine, aunque también aparece en otros contextos.28  

On some occasions, as in example (2), the usage might be justified on stylistic grounds, but I find it hard to invoke them in other cases. See e.g. (3):

(3) El sistema que quiere que los films se terminen de la mejor manera, con “happy end” que echan a la joven estrella en brazos de la ingenua después de haber castigado al traidor29. (DP, 101, p. 45)

As for the second part of my corpus, nothing seems to point to any additional reasons for the use of anglicisms to those discussed above. It should be noted, however, that the increase in the knowledge of English in Spain in recent times seems to have imposed a brake on the phonological and orthographical adaptation of anglicisms. Usually, loanwords with similar phonic structures are more easily adopted into the borrowing language (e.g. detective, Sp. /detektíbe/), while less similar words undergo sound and spelling change, as in Spanish chutar < "shoot". Words like travelling and technicolor have long been accepted by the DRAE in the forms travelín and tecnicolor, thus showing minor adaptations in spelling as well as, in the case of travelín, of pronunciation. Nevertheless they very frequently appear with their English spellings, often italicised or placed between quotation marks, and the same applies to other officially sanctioned Spanish words, such as the above mentioned detective or gángster. This surely means that were these words to be read aloud, the corresponding pronunciations would in all probability be closer to English than to any Spanish adaptation.

In this respect, twenty or thirty years ago, the difference between those who used English or Spanish pronunciations could be said to reflect a difference in education. This was not so much because those who pronounced the words correctly knew English, but that they had very likely had the opportunity of travelling and getting in touch with foreign speakers. On the other hand, when many English nouns were pronounced in what was thought to be “foreign” fashion, it was generally French that set the standard. Now, the choice for either language tends to be generational, reinforced by the amount of education the speaker has had. Significantly more members of the younger generations in Spain study foreign languages – which almost universally means just English. The following difference in pronunciation, which is very often commented upon in the media, illustrates this generational difference most clearly: Michael Douglas (/dáglas/, the son of Kirk Douglas /dúglas/.)

It is moreover worth mentioning that specialised magazines and films themselves seem to be riding in almost opposite directions: there has recently been a tendency for original titles, and with them, anglicised pronunciations, to be preserved in foreign (i.e. American) films, probably because distributors are themselves fully familiar with English, and assume their audience to be, too. The “Star Wars” series is most illustrative. When the first trilogy was first shown in Spain, some twenty-five years ago, the titles used to be translated: to the vast majority of my generation, the films are known as “La Guerra de las Galaxias”. Our children, however, know the series by its English title, and this is also how it is advertised on posters and through merchandising. The same “anglicizing” effect is evident in dubbing (as noted above, most films shown in theatres are dubbed in Spain, although the new DVD technology now grants an increasingly easier access to original soundtracks): twenty-five years ago Obi Wan Kenobi and Yoda belonged to the ancient order of /xédis/… but now they are /jedái/.

In contrast to the tendency discussed here, magazines tend to employ Spanish words to refer to jobs and activities in the world of film, as “director de fotografía”, “director de producción”, “diseño de producción” and “post producción” (the fact that they are semantic anglicisms should not concern us here).30 Stylesheets for newspapers and periodicals may have had a significant impact here, since recently the Spanish equivalent is preferred whenever possible (even when this generally produces loan translations).

 

4. Conclusion

There are many words in both glossaries I have not accounted for in this paper, but the main tendencies are clear enough. Usage, as I have argued, tends to follow the changes undergone in a speech community – on which official monitoring has a limited influence unless it is part of a general policy affecting the entire society (this was the case of “official purism” in European totalitarian governments, cf. Görlach, 2002:3). An excellent example of this has been provided in Spanish by nominar and its derivations. Among those who used to warn against its use was Fernando Lázaro Carreter, one of the most eminent linguists of present-day Spanish; in an article published in 1975 he complained about the "bad use of ‘nominado’", pointing to the American elections as the most immediate source. He said that the world of movies did not worry him because the Academy Awards were only of marginal interest to the general public in Spain. What he could not possibly have foreseen31 was that only a few years afterwards the Academy Awards would indeed come to be of general interest, and that words like “nominado” and Oscar and hollywoodienses would be heard everywhere - simply because the Academy started nominating well-known Spanish actors (Javier Bardem, as Best Actor, in 2001, in “Before the night falls”) and films in the category of Best Foreign Language Film. Four of these32 were award winners. The 1999 winner, Pedro Almodóvar has just become one of the very few non-English speakers in the history of these awards nominated for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay (and the first Spaniard ever to obtain the latter).

I would like to conclude with a few words on the attitudes towards the phenomenon of anglicisms in general. It is true that there are some apocalyptic voices who raise a clamour against the deterioration of Spanish by the hordes of unnecessary anglicisms entering the language. They tend to overlook the difference between isolated usages, temporary fashions, and permanent additions, but as a rule such people are not linguists, who generally have a more detached perception of what is going on. My results certainly suggest less "flooding" than what is currently assumed. Snobbery as a source of barbarisms in any language should in my opinion never be advanced as a criterion of objection against them. Snob usages tend to be so bluntly evident that many of them are simply rejected, even now in the era of mass media, when they can reach far more people than ever before.

What the members of both the Spanish “Real Academia” and the “Reales Academias” elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world are most concerned about is not so much the number of loanwords; rather, they are worried by the effects of a combination of an unprecedented habit of borrowing (including syntactic, semantic, morphological and phonological anglicisms, more pervasive now than a few years ago) with the general low levels of knowledge of Spanish. I share their opinion to a certain extent, though, as a historical linguist I tend to be rather sceptical on apocalyptical views of destruction of languages, though perhaps some observations could be made. The Spanish language is “officially” ten centuries old; the English language fifteen. Both have received floods of foreign loans throughout their respective histories. Both have rejected and abandoned a lot of them, have adapted many, and with them, have incorporated foreign phonological, morphological and syntactic resources. Still, nobody will deny that both languages are still very much alive.

On the other hand, languages do die – but there are “natural” and “unnatural” types of death (cf. Moreno-Cabrera 2001 [2000]:213–214) and the only language death that truly worries me is the second one – when native speakers can no longer be found.33 This development is indeed threatening many minority indigenous languages in America, Africa and Asia today, of which we have few spoken records and fewer, if any, written records. It is a sorrowful cultural loss towards the avoidance of which more and more efforts are badly needed. Spanish (or English) is clearly not approaching a similar threat in the immediate future – nor will its fate be at all comparable to that of those languages actually in danger of becoming extinct. There are a number of reasons for this. In the first place, there is the obvious fact that Spanish and English presently rate among the three world languages with the highest number of native speakers. Secondly, in case some of the extra-territorial varieties of both languages do succeed in becoming independent languages,34 there is every reason to believe that Spanish and English will continue to be spoken natively across very wide areas. Thirdly, variation within a mother tongue leading to its diversification into daughter languages is one of the foundation stones of historical linguistics: this “natural” death has affected all natural languages in the past (Germanic, Latin ...) and will presumably affect Spanish or English in the long run, although today’s sociohistoric-cultural facts (among which living in a Global Village may be a key concept) make predictions riskier than ever. In any case, if their legacy compares to that of their ancestors, concerns as to the destruction and disappearance of English or Spanish seem to be both untimely and excessive.   

 

List of abbreviations  

AMGFG          All Movies Guide Film Glossary
DEA               Dictionary of European Anglicisms  

DRAE           

Diccionario de la Real Academia Española  
EB                Encyclopaedia Britannica

FK               

FotoKem Glossary  
EIC               Enciclopedia Ilustrada del Cine  

GCP         

Giallo Cinema Page  

IMDbFG            

Internet Movie Database Film Glossary

IOC             

Ignacio Ortega Campos  

MBG             

 Medialink Broadcasting Guide   
MWOL              Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary Online  
OALDEE Oxford Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary. Encyclopaedic edition.  
OED Oxford English Dictionary

 

Addenda

It occurred to me that it might be of interest to go through two issues of at least one movie magazine which came out after I concluded the second part of my research (Fotogramas is perhaps the most popular). The first one (1903, May 2002) corresponds to the date I submitted this article for publication. The second one to the date I handed in the final revised version almost a year afterwards (1914, March 2003). In what follows, I have included only “new anglicisms” – i.e. those that do not appear in any of the three glossaries. The examples are, in my opinion, illustrative of the fact that new technologies and famous films are among the main sources of new loanwords.  

1. Fotogramas 1903, May 2002    

  1. Todo Jedi sabe cómo encender una espada de luz (p. 68)

  2. En Australia se usaron más decorados, 67, e hicieron menos trabajo de sonido; el resto se hizo con pantalla azul, miniaturas y entornos digitales (p. 74)

  3. En el Episodio I, Palpatine es solo un senador con oscuras intenciones, además de la clandestina cabeza pensante de los Sith, adoradores del Lado Oscuro de la Fuerza (p. 82)

  4. Experto en relaciones cibernéticas humanas, capaz de hablar cuatro millones de formas de comunicación, esclavo momentáneo del Jabba, y convertido en ídolo para los pequeños ewoks, es el charlatán metálico más famoso del universo (p. 83)

  5. Sala de post-producción lineal Broadcast, salas de post-producción digital (EDIT, AVID, PREMIERE, IMAC, FINAL CUT PRO) (p. 119)

  6. Debutó en 1963 con un film-encuesta, “Hitler, connais pas” (p. 136)

  7. Selección de capítulos, making off, tomas falsas, trailers, biofilmografías, entrevistas, bandas sonoras ... (p. 141)  

  8. Película remasterizada en Widescreen 1:85 con sonido Dolby Digital 5.1. 168

  9. Videoestreno (p. 170)

  10. David Lynch ha participado muy estrechamente en la edición en DVD de “Terciopelo Azul” que saldrá al mercado americano el mes que viene en un nuevo transfer que incorporará, además de la versión original, el doblaje en francés y en español (p. 174)

  11. En USA mandan los niños, y triunfa la continuación, rodada para el mercado videográfico, de las aventuras de Cenicienta (p. 178)

  12. Nueva remasterización digital (p. 179)

  13. ¿Quién se atreve con “Scary Brother Movie”? (p. 182)

2. Fotogramas 1914, March 2003

  1. Bertolucci megastar: Jamás hubiera imaginado el comunista Bertolucci llegar a la Meca del capitalismo cinematográfico (“Hollywood es como la ciudad prohibida de Pekín”, dijo) y salir con nueve estatuillas (Suplemento Especial sobre los Oscar, p. 22)

  2. La felicidad del recuerdo de alguna escena o chiste en particular era contagiosa, y antes de llegar a mi destino todo el vagón vivía una situación de screwball comedy (p. 8) 

  3. ... esta valiosísima corona de diamantes engarzada con su cinefagia “hitchie” (“Vértigo”, “Atrapa a un ladrón”, y “Marnie, la ladrona”), y su desbordante talento ... (p. 22)  

  4. La respuesta a estas preguntas la ha resuelto la directora con unos Pre-Cog menos sofisticados que los de Spielberg y una organización más casera que la de Wenders (p. 16)  

  5. El dilema “cine vs. DVD” apenas me afecta por motivos profesionales, pero comprendo las ventajas de un zamorano con su “home cinema” y la posibilidad de elección idiomática frente a los asientos pringados de grasa de palomitas (p. 34)  

  6. Los personajes de John Sayles pueden parecer prisioneros de un mundo interior muy complejo, casi literario, pero no es así. Angela Basset (...) piensa que el “bestiario saylesiano” no es tan artificioso ... (p. 143)

  7. Opción DVD-ROM con más de 15 prestaciones adicionales (p. 178)

  8. Terror freak de toque “lynchiano” en la historia de un estudiante que, tras ser salvado de morir – accidente ya surrealista - por un conejo imaginario de dos metros, sufre una serie de paranoias. (p. 180)

  9. Extras del DVD: Entrevistas de actores y director. Cómo se hizo. Ficha técnica. Imágenes de rodaje. Easter eggs. Críticas de cine. Tráiler.

  10. (Carácterísticas técnicas) Widescreen Letterbox (p. 188)  

  11. (Características técnicas) Fullscreen (p. 188)  

  12. ... me encuentro con el peor DVD del mundo, y eso que he visto ediciones completamente basura: no solo no hay Scope, sino que la copia está sacada del más repugnante master de vídeo (p. 191)

  13. El carisma de su personaje, Jinx, podrían convertirla en protagonista de su propia película, que sería el primer spin-off salido de los films Bond (p. 193)

  14. El término “pick up” es utilizado por el director para indicar que quiere rehacer una pequeña parte de la escena (p. 199)

  15. Cuentan con tres paneles LCD panorámicas de 16:9 (nativo) de alta resolución y 0,7 pulgadas y 858 x 84 (AE200) y 960 x 540 píxeles (p. 202)

3. Words from issue 1903 repeated in issue 1914: making off, remasterizar, transfer (all of them having to do with the new DVD format).

 

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Notes:

1 This paper is a revised and extended version of “How Javier Bardem was 'nominated' but did not get the 'Oscar' or when Spaniards became 'hollywoodienses'”, guest lecture delivered in May, 2001 in the University of Leiden. My gratitude goes to Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, for her suggestions in her wonderful editing work. Mistakes remain unmistakeably mine. Part of the my research for the present paper was financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology within the frame of project ref. PB2001-2988.

2 Görlach (2002) is one of the most recent studies in this respect - particularly interesting are the materials relating to languages from Eastern Europe where changing historical events have led to a increasing influence of English.  

3 There is a wide scale of positions ranging from that of the self-appointed guardians of the purity of the lexicon to that of enthusiastic adopters of anything foreign. For details, see e.g. Medina-López (1996).  

4 Again, the studies in Görlach (2002) are good evidence of the fact that field research generally provide less “apocalyptical” views on the subject. Cf. for instance the following: “This, along with the fact that many loans seem to be part of trends and waves that make a lot of noise, but are relatively soon forgotten, may indicate that the ‘invasion’ is not as quite as overwhelming as sometimes feared and that Norwegian is not endangered but will survive as a language into the foreseeable future” (Graedler 2002:79).

5 Cf. Chambers et al. (2002:325): “At first time, real-time evidence would seem to be the ideal mechanism for exploring language change, but real time evidence actually poses a number of problems for researchers. Researchers who want to use real-time evidence for studying language change have only two options: (1) they can compare evidence from a new study to some pre-existing data, or (2) they can re-survey either a community (through a trend survey) or a group of informants (through a panel survey) after a period of time has elapsed. Neither option is without problems, but both can offer valuable insight into language change”.  

6 “It is impossible to know if a ‘blade runner’ will become so archetypical a figure as a ‘sheriff’ in a Western is or when the ‘slit scan’ will be abandoned in favour of more advanced techniques ... Time will solve these issues” (my translation for this and any other quotations in Spanish in the original, unless otherwise stated).

7 “1. Term or manner of speech belonging to the English language. 2. Word or term from this language when employed by another language. 3. The use of English words or terms in other languages”.  

8 “Foreign usage wholly integrated in the language”.  

9 “Term, phrase or idiom, which one language borrows from another”.  

10 “1. New term, phrase or idiom in a language. 2. The use of these new items”.  

11 “An increasing use of passive constructions in journalese has been observed recently. The Spanish news agency EFE advises their editors to avoid mechanical translations of many English passive sentences as Spanish passive constructions with the subject as their first element, such as, for example, “...” . The standard prefers “...”, and even more, the active voice”.  

12 “In the pronunciation of foreign words – above all, anglicisms -, foreign proper nouns, both place names and of personal names, acronyms, etc., whose phonology is different from Spanish articulation, foreign consonants tend to be reproduced: final consonants and consonant groups are preserved”.

13 “Thus Anglicisms enter the language in the phonetic level, and we have novelties such as (...) (“aftersun [sic], lifting, aftershave, camping, record, set, jet, beautiful people, chairmen, manager, LP, laser, pack”) and many others”.  

14 “The influence exerted by English on the vocabulary (or lexical component) of another language, in various ways – it can deliver new meanings or nuances into the borrowing language, loan translations...”.  

15 Loan translations are in fact very numerous, and on many occasions the choice when a new concept is imported and the English word is to be avoided. This is also a favourite resource in order to avoid lexical imports in languages such as Icelandic (cf. Kvaran and Svavarsdóttir 2002:99) or Modern Greek (cf. Stathi 2002:322).  

16 Cf. e.g. Crystal (1997:90–91) and MUY ESPECIAL (1997:42–49). The latter article reports specifically on the financial aspects of the American film industry, but the whole issue provides an excellent overview on the phenomenon of the cinema around the world.  

17 Foreign films in Spain are generally dubbed – theatres exhibiting films with the original sound tracks are rare and mainly located in big cities, like Madrid or Barcelona. This means that viewers are more confronted with the culture represented in the film than with its language. This in principle might seem an argument against a huge linguistic influence, and it certainly would be if dubbed versions did not include English words and expressions and anglicized pronunciations – but they do, and this tendency has increased enormously in recent times. But see below.  

18 The boundaries between writing and speech have undoubtedly been blurred by almost universal literacy and school teaching in the Western world. Thus, writing can influence speech and vice versa in ways that were not possible at all even two centuries ago.  

19 For discussion on reasons having to do with style and register, see below.  

20 Twenty years ago, when computers and word processors were not available in text composing and general lay out and editing, it was not only length that was important: also that the sequence of letters of “película” is more difficult to type than film, and therefore liable to spelling mistakes.  

21 For example, Dutch (Berteloot and Van der Sijs 2000:53), Italian (Pulcini 2002:165), Russian (Maximova 2002:208), Bulgarian (Alexievna 2002:257). See also above, on the suffix “–ing” and below, on happy end.  

22 For a discussion on general lexical borrowing, see Hock (1988 [1986]:380–425, and especially section 14.5, “Motivations for borrowing” (408–421); for exemplification taking English not in the role presented in this paper, that of  donor but as receiving language, see the various relevant sections in Baugh & Cable (2002), Rodríguez-Redondo (2001:406–440) and De la Cruz Cabanillas (2001:699–725).  

23 “Thorndike parachutes for combat at the end of “Man Hunt” and “Hangmen also die!”. To the eternal “the end” an honest “not” is appended”.  

24 “Those Hollywood heroes used to be thirty centimetres taller than us, and, on top of that, used to spend the ninety minutes making fun of the chaps from the Axis, and get the blonde, green-eyed heroine in the happy end”.  

25 This parameter is variously marked by the different human groups – the usage of “she” for ships by sailors being one of the best known in English (cf. Guzmán:2002). On the other hand, the phenomenon in general is well known in sociolinguistics: see e.g. Chambers et al. (2002), especially chapters 22 by Lesley Milroy and 23 by Peter L. Patrick, devoted to Social Networks and The Speech Community, respectively.  

26 Variation is often due to the wish to show, through speech, membership of a certain group ....; this is very often true of communicators - to such a degree that a new jargon comes up. This jargon is deemed indispensable as an identity mark –and in the long run ends by influencing general usage.  

27 Thus in Italian, Russian, etc. In Croatian, Bulgarian and Greek the expression has been further adapted into hepiend, khepiend, khapi ed, respectively; Cf. Görlach (2002:36, 64, 80, 91, 120).  

28 “A ‘final feliz’ is the literal translation of what the French and the Spanish believe is conveyed by the phrase ‘happy end’ in English, because they are used to English-speaking films that finish with “The End” Robert Angl. itself states that it is an erroneous adaptation of ‘happy ending’, belonging, though not exclusively, to the jargon of films”.  

29 “... the system wishing films to end the best way possible, with a ‘happy end’ in which the young star is thrown into the innocent girl’s arms after having punished the treacherous villain”.  

30 Cf. the phrase pantalla azul in the Addenda. The Spanish expression is the loan translation-adaptation of blue backing and is consistently, and very frequently employed, in a long article, precisely on the last issue of “Star Wars”: “Attack of the clones”.  

31 My reference for this article comes from a compilation prepared by the author himself and covering the period 1975–1996, in the Prologue to which he comments upon the changing nature of lexicon and society: “Está, por otra parte, lo inseguro de los fenómenos observables en un momento dado, que pueden aparecer o asentarse en muy poco tiempo; de hecho, algunos vocablos cuyo empleo criticaba antes de 1992, aparecieron registrados en el Diccionario académico de ese año; y tal vez con mi voto favorable (“On the other hand, phenomena observed at a certain point can be rather unpredictable because they can rise and settle down in a very short time. In fact, some words I disliked before 1992 are now included in the Academy Dictionary –and I am likely to have voted for their inclusion” (My note: Lázaro Carreter is a member of the Royal Academy) (Lázaro-Carreter 1997:27). The exact quotation of the 1975 article, by the way, is as follows: “Leemos y escuchamos que tal o cual actor o director ha sido nominado para un Oscar; pero es noticia que sólo interesa a algún experto en celuloide y el vocablo ofrece desde allí escaso peligro” (Lázaro-Carreter 1997:36) (“We read or hear that a certain actor or director has been nominated for an Oscar; but this kind of news is only interesting for film experts and this item [i.e. ‘nominar’] is not dangerous in this particular field”).  

32 “El discreto encanto de la burguesía”, by Luis Buñuel (1972) “Volver a empezar”, by José Luis Garci (1982); “Belle Époque”, by Fernando Trueba (1993); “Todo sobre mi madre” by Pedro Almodóvar (1999).  

33 This is an important specification: for example, Latin is still spoken as the official language of the Vatican (cf. e.g. http://www.liturgia.it/ ), and there is even an international broadcast of world news in Classical Latin (Nuntii Latini) , produced by YLE, the Finnish Broadcasting Company (http://www.yleradio1.fi/nuntii/) Yet, Latin is a dead language.

34 The notion “independent language” is indeed a most tricky issue – involving such different though interconnected factors as official recognition at various levels, development of literary traditions, native cross-generational transmission and so on. My perception is that the case of “Spanglish” - the term loosely refers to the Spanish language as spoken by increasing numbers of Hispanics in the United States, and whose vocabulary includes a remarkably high percentage of English words, adapted to the Spanish rules in various degrees - is the focus of far more controversy not only among scholars but also among all kinds of language users than Tok Pisin or Bislama (cf. Trudgill 2003). For further information on Spanglish see The Spanish Language Site, Cervantes Virtual Site and José Ramón Morala’s personal webpage.