Abstract:
This study examined the introduction, adaptation, usage, and acceptance of lexical borrowings in the Colombian online newspaper El Tiempo from 1990 to 2012. While building on the foundation of prior research of sociolinguistic orientation on languages in contact, this study also included innovative approaches: the texts analyzed incorporate not only articles by El Tiempo journalists, but also the comments of bloggers linked to the newspaper's site; online interviews were conducted with journalists and bloggers alike in an effort to determine their attitudes and motivations in relation to their vocabulary choices; and pronunciation patterns in relation to borrowed words were analyzed in videos from ET Canal El Tiempo. Contrary to the research questions posited at the outset, differences between the language of professional journalists and the language of the at-large bloggers proved to be minimal. The research found that there was a prescriptive tendency among journalists and bloggers alike to look for linguistic correctness and that their linguistic decisions were highly influenced by the guidelines from the Real Academia de la Lengua (RAE). When tracking and analyzing the different lexical choices and their relative frequencies in the writing of these two groups, no definite pattern surfaced, but only weak tendencies. Moreover, the research concludes that, whether the loanwords were newly introduced or already common, there was a tendency among the two different groups of writers to use the Spanish translation of the loanwords in addition to using the lexical borrowing. Much needed replications of this study involving a larger sampling may reveal, over time, more representative differences between journalists' and bloggers' motivations for their lexical choices.
