Borrowings and regionalisms in the United States Spanish press

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to investigate what was happening to Spanish in the United States as it appeared in the print media. Three representative newspapers, one from New York, one from Los Angeles and one from Mexico, were chosen for a comparative analysis.;Newspapers were read and suspected words were coded along various dimensions: borrowings from English, types of borrowings, and regionalisms. The genre, nature, and origin of each article was also coded. The number of words per article was coded in order to have a more accurate picture of the diffusion of borrowings and regionalisms. Good inter-rater reliability was obtained.;Specific hypotheses were tested utilizing ANOVAS. Results indicated English has more of an impact on the U.S. Spanish press than on the Mexican press, but there were not significant differences found in the U.S. sample. There was a tendency for all newspapers to use more borrowings straight from English, rather than trying to integrate borrowings into the Spanish grammatical system. Most English borrowings appeared in advertisements. There were less regionalisms in the L.A. newspaper than in the Mexican or N.Y. newspaper. The implications of the results were discussed, as well as the direction of future research efforts.