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Article published In:
English World-Wide
Vol. 44:1 (2023) ► pp.118–145

The Spanish component of Falkland Islands English

| Universidad de la República | Universiteit Leiden
| Universidad de la República | Academia Nacional de Letras de Uruguay
| Universiteit Leiden

English is the most used language in the Falkland Islands; however, Spanish was also spoken in the 19th century, when beef livestock farming was one of the economic engines of the Islands. Such businesses used to be managed by gauchos from South America, and their presence is still evident in the lexicon of Falkland Islands English. This article presents a novel methodological approach to the elaboration of loanwords corpora. Loanwords are later analysed in terms of their occurrence, frequency, appearance in dictionaries and the semantic fields they have penetrated. We have attempted to account for the volume of words that Spanish speakers lent to the Islands’ English. We observed that Spanish loanwords are mainly – though not exclusively – related to horse tack and horse types: it is clear from our data that most words are tightly connected to gauchos’ vernacular and not exclusively with their equestrian duties.

Keywords: contact linguistics, corpus linguistics, loanwords, Spanish, Falkland Islands English, semantic permeability
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Falklands English: An overview
    • 1.2Loanwords
  • 2.Spanish loanwords in FIE
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Corpus and data collection
    • 3.2Classification
  • 4.Analysis and results
    • 4.1Frequent in the corpus but not in dictionaries
      • 4.1.1 Cincha
      • 4.1.2Maneas
      • 4.1.3 Bozal
      • 4.1.4 Campo
      • 4.1.5 Cabestro
    • 4.2Most permeable semantic fields
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
Published online: 29 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.21017.rod
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