Degree of penetration and diffusion of three Anglicisms in Mexican Spanish

Abstract

This paper describes the degree of penetration and diffusion of the following lexical anglicisms in Mexican Spanish: bullying, gay, and checar. We examine both linguistic and social indicators to find out in which way a lexical item is introduced into a speech community and expands throughout different social and linguistic contexts. We search for occurrences of these lexical items in different linguistic corpora, as well as in the search engine Google. The findings are further supported with a survey questionnaire that considers social variables such as gender, age, and education level. With this methodology, we try to combine production and competence data in order to describe the degree of penetration and diffusion of these loanwords in Mexican Spanish.

Original received: 2014/04/03

Review sent to author: 2014/07/22

Accepted: 2014/08/26

.