Una aproximación sociolingüística al préstamo en el español actual: características y variación

Abstract

According to recent studies, the import of loanwords from other languages is currently one of the main mechanisms for creating new words in Spanish. Therefore, we are facing an important phenomenon which is strongly influenced by factors outside the linguistic system itself, like the speakers' perception of a particular linguistic expression, the prestige accorded to the donor language, or the tendency to make a more creative use of language depending on variables such as age and sex. For these reasons, in this study we propose to conduct a thorough characterization of the loanword from a sociolinguistic perspective that takes into account all its dimensions: origin, part of speech, topic, adaptation, geographic and chronological distribution, etc. To do so, we made use of some corpora to obtain a real set of data so that our analysis could be quantitatively and qualitatively relevant. Furthermore, we address the lexical variation caused by the incorporation of some loanwords, we study what elements can lead to the selection of one or another variant, and we also present different categories that can help us to classify both loanwords and their possible equivalents. Additionally, we provide an overview of the main contributions to the concept of loanword made by various authors throughout history.