Sports and Adventure Tourism Anglicisms in Spanish: Esferatón or Zorbing?

Abstract

Active and adventure tourism are two types of tourism that take place outdoors in contact with nature. The present article discusses the language of sports and adventure tourism in Spanish focusing on the use of Anglicisms. We examine the different aspects related to the integration and adaptation of English words. The integration process is often attested through the change in the spelling of the word and its adaptation to the Spanish orthographic system. Furthermore, the influence of English upon Spanish pervades not only its lexicon, but also its morphology, syntax, semantics and phraseology. In this article, we analyse word morphology in terms of plural formation and gender assignment. In order to carry out the research, the data are retrieved from a corpus and an associated database, known as Anglicor, that the authors have been compiling since 2003 up to now. The corpus is made up of several subcorpora, whose main topics are computers, medicine and health issues, fashion, beauty, science and technology, and tourism. The tourism subcorpus is a collection of texts from airline magazines, brochures, academic journals, leaflets, websites and active tourism magazines. For this study, we have made use of recent texts from specialised websites and printed magazines. Thus, the explanations are illustrated with examples obtained from authentic sources, which will provide an up-to-date overview of the presence, use and significance of Anglicisms in the language of sports and adventure tourism in Spanish.