Actitudes hacia anglicismos necesarios y superfluos : Un estudio sociolingüístico entre neoyorquinos bilingües

• Main Author: Eriksson, Hans
• Format: Others
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Högskolan Dalarna, Spanska 2020
• Subjects: bilingualism; Metropolitan New York; loanwords; anglicisms; linguistic attitudes; Languages and Literature; Språk och litteratur
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:du-34245

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the attitudes towards English loanwords, "anglicisms", among Spanish-English bilinguals in the Metropolitan area of New York. According to the 2010 US Census, this area encompassed approximately 3.5 million people above the age of 5 speaking Spanish at home, excluding the quantity of people who have some knowledge of Spanish but who do not speak it at home.   The method used was a direct one, whereby we sent out a questionnaire, inquiring about the acceptability of 6 anglicisms deemed "necessary" and 6 anglicisms deemed "superfluous" as well as inquiring about the informants’ attitudes towards not only the users of anglicisms but also towards the broader use in society. Given that our goal was to not only have an equal amount of women and men, but also to have 3 clearly defined age groups, for whom Spanish is the maternal language, our end result of 12 participants fitting that description was somewhat underwhelming which led to problems drawing relevant conclusions.  Our main hypothesis was that we would find a higher generalized acceptance level towards anglicisms among our informants across all variables as compared to the wide disapproval found in the broader US bilingual population. In addition, we expected to see no major age-related differences in the attitudes and that men and women be equally accepting towards the necessary anglicisms but that women would show a lower level of approval towards the superfluous anglicisms.  Our hypotheses were mostly borne out by our data other than for the one assuming no agerelated differences in attitudes towards our two categories of anglicisms. The results indicated a markedly lower acceptance level in the oldest age-group than in the 2 younger age-groups, but only for the superfluous kind, while the necessary anglicisms saw similar approval levels across all age-groups.