What Loanwords Tell Us about Spanish (and Spain)

Using one lexicographical tool, the Diccionario Crítico Etimológico Castellano e Hispánico (DECH), and two corpora, the HathiTrust’s digital library and the Google Books Ngrams, we tracked the occurrence of thousands of loanwords in Spanish to describe their use, origin, and historical context. In d...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Adriana Soto-Corominas, Javier De la Rosa, Juan Luis Suárez
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Open Library of Humanities 2018-02-01
Series:Digital Studies
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.digitalstudies.org//articles/297
Description
Summary:Using one lexicographical tool, the Diccionario Crítico Etimológico Castellano e Hispánico (DECH), and two corpora, the HathiTrust’s digital library and the Google Books Ngrams, we tracked the occurrence of thousands of loanwords in Spanish to describe their use, origin, and historical context. In doing so, we used computational methodologies to parse, lemmatize, group, count, and extract the information of all these tools. Results from parsing the etymologies of the DECH dictionary reveal a strong influence of Greek and French on the Spanish lexicon. The results from tracking the occurrence of loanwords in Spanish reveal a clear trend in the use of loanwords over time and support the hypothesis that the lexicon of a language reflects the sociopolitical and sociocultural change that their speakers undergo.
ISSN:1918-3666