The influence of neologisms in Spanish discourse: an approach to dictionarisation criteria

Abstract

[eng] The use of new technologies in the past century has resulted in many linguistic neologisms in English that have been borrowed into other languages, such as Spanish. The diffusion of borrowings of English neologisms has prompted questions regarding their inclusion in dictionaries of target languages, paving the way for investigation into the dictionarisation criteria that govern their incorporation (Adelstein & Freixa, 2013 and Bernal et al., 2020). Nevertheless, these studies are relatively recent and exhibit incongruities in determining whether a word merits inclusion in dictionaries or not. For example, while Bernal et al. (2020) advocates for equal use of the criteria, frequency is considered crucial and takes precedence over the other criteria in Adelstein & Freixa (2013). To test the validity of the different dictionarisation criteria proposed in the literature, this thesis studies six popular English neologisms borrowed into Spanish: three are already included in Spanish dictionaries – hacker/jáquer, tweet/tuit, and bloguero – and three neologisms are not yet accepted – app, look, and influencer. The methodology combines the analysis of corpus data (NOW-English and NOW-Spanish, Davies 2016- and 2012-2019), two dictionaries (the Oxford English Dictionary, OED, and the Diccionario de la Lengua Española, DLE), and a Google Forms survey, which offers preliminary results on the speakers’ attitudes towards the degree of integration of the six words. The results from this study underscore the necessity for further research into dictionarisation criteria. While certain similarities were observed in the criteria employed, discrepancies also emerged, highlighting the need for additional investigation to establish objective and robust criteria governing the inclusion of words in Spanish dictionaries as adapted terms or their rejection to preserve their neological character.