Social stratification of loanwords : a corpus-based approach to Anglicisms in Argentina

With the aim of better understanding the social function of Anglicisms in Argentina, this study documents the distribution of Anglicisms across social groups and identifies the semantic domains they cover. In order to access Anglicisms currently used in Argentine Spanish, a 1.8 million-word corpus of newspaper articles from 2012 to 2013 was created and processed to extract English loanwords. This study presents a method for automatic loanword extraction that offers advantages over manual identification. The analyses conducted show that the English loanwords present in the Argentine newspaper corpus are not equally distributed across all newspapers but rather are highly concentrated in La Nacion, a prestigious newspaper targeted towards a highly educated upper-class segment of the population.