Fashion Anglicisms in Spanish Gossip Magazines

Abstract

Fashion is one of the most influential social phenomenon nowadays. It is accesible to the general public through different means of communication, being gossip magazines one of them. Fashion is always changing and evolving. New styles and tendencies continuously emerge and are named with new words, usually English or “from the English language”. This paper aims to examine the degree of use of these words in Spanish gossip magazines. Thus, several magazines have been analyzed and the Anglicisms related to fashion were recorded and classified according to formal typology, subject area and discourse marking. They were looked up in the online Oxford Dictionaries in order to find out their definition in English and their translation into Spanish and in the Royal Spanish Academy Dictionary (DRAE) to explore if these words were already accepted in the Spanish language. The number of Anglicisms found was quite high and most of them were non-adapted Anglicisms. They were usually garments, styles and general words used in fashion. Adjectives describing garments were also quite common. The number of voices admitted in the DRAE was not too high, probably being words newly arrived in the Spanish language.