“Para Hacer un Buen Reentry es Esencial que te Salga Bien el Bottom Primero” – The Presence of English in Portuguese and Spanish Surf Talk

Abstract

Although modern surfing can be traced back to early 20th century Hawaii, only quite recently has surfing become a truly global phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to discuss how the arrival of such a new cultural phenomenon as surfing to the Spanish and Portuguese speaking world is managed linguistically, i.e. to account for how one goes about talking about surfing in Portuguese and Spanish. I propose to investigate how the existing surfing vocabulary in English affects surf talk in Portuguese and Spanish. On the one hand, I will determine which words are incorporated as such and which pieces are incorporated as semantic loans. On the other hand, I will describe what old, native vocabulary is adapted to fit the needs of surf talk. The results indicate that loans are used in roughly 65 per cent of the surfing terms in both Portuguese and Spanish. On a more detailed level, the surfing manoeuvres and conditions, for example, are mostly lexicalized using direct loans, as the terms rentry ‘re-entry’ and bottom ‘bottom turn’ used in the title indicate. Waves, on the other hand, are most often described by means of loan translations, i.e. using Portuguese and Spanish terms reflecting English uses. For example, the goal of any surfer is to ride a tube, tubo in both Portuguese and Spanish. The main difference between the two languages is found in the manoeuvre terms, where Portuguese has introduced several own expressions (e.g. cavada and rasgada) while Spanish relies almost uniquely on direct loans from English.