A Pan-Hispanic approach to the usage of Anglicisms in the thematic area of sports

Abstract

The influence that English exerts on different languages has been widely examined. Particularly, many studies that have brought the classification of Anglicisms according to thematic fields into focus have shown that, in relation to various languages and varieties, sports is the area in which Anglicisms seem to appear most frequently (Seidel 2010, Andersen 2011). Considering Spanish, when introducing English names of sports, the two main choices are either to adopt/adapt these foreign names or to calque them into the recipient language. This paper aims to clarify which of these two options has been the most successful one and whether diatopic variation plays a part in this respect. To fulfil this goal, a series of equivalent pairs and their variants are looked up in CORPES XXI, and the statistics provided by this corpus in relation to geographical distribution are analysed. Results show that diatopic variation affects disparity in the frequency of use of the different forms of English ball sports names in Spanish.