English and indigenous loanwords in Chile: a linguistic anthropological perspective

Abstract

This study addresses the phenomenon commonly known as loanwords under two novel perspectives. On the one hand, it looks at lexical borrowing from the point of view of linguistic anthropology. On the other, it abandons the traditional usage of terminology like borrowing and loanwords in favor of the term lexical code-copies. This concept belongs to the code-copying framework, an alternative to the traditional linguistic paradigm that gives more attention to dominance relations between languages in contact. Instead of following the traditional methodology of quantifying instances of loanwords in written texts, the linguistic anthropological perspective that this study takes entails that the main source of data will be the thoughts and beliefs of speakers about words in their language that have a foreign origin. In this study, the social representations of 16 speakers of Chilean Spanish about lexical code-copies from English and the indigenous languages of the region will be addressed. In addition to this, attention will be given to other related concepts such as language ideologies and language attitudes, which contribute to the portrayal of language as a socially, historically and politically situated practice.