Emerging vocabulary: the influence of English on medical Spanish

Abstract

This paper discusses the influence of the use of English as a lingua franca in the field of academic research in medicine and its effects on the Spanish medical language, as evidenced after an in-depth revision of the existing literature. The study has been based on the analysis of a medical corpus made up of 311 Conclusion sections of Spanish articles, which correspond to the specialties of Cardiology, Paediatrics and Psychology. Upon justifying the decision of using the English language as essential for academic life and international communication, the discussion focuses on the impact of the specialized literature on professionals whose native language is not English and the inclusion of new vocabulary sometimes justified as the result of a need on the part of scientists to explain new concepts. The massive incorporation of vocabulary has led researchers to deal with the different ways in which neologisms are introduced in the Spanish medical language analyzing the corresponding results, which include: words from other languages which are slightly modified; words from other languages added with or without morphological adaptation; addition of suffixes or prefixes; the use of “false friends” and the use of certain words not registered in the dictionary.