Dublin Core
Title
The use of Anglicisms in authentic Italian and Slovene commercial correspondence
Abstract
Analyses of various business languages show a great presence of Anglicisms, which can be ascribed to companies’ desires to be competitive on the global market. In line with current globalization trends, the impact of English as a source language on Italian and Slovene is considerable (see Bombi 2005, Rosati 2004, Sicherl 1999, Šabec 2011). In order to determine whether there are any common tendencies or divergences between the two business languages in the use of Anglicisms, a corpus of business correspondence texts was collected and studied combining qualitative and quantitative research methods. The corpus consists of 530 business correspondence texts, written in real-life communicative situations. There are 265 texts written by Italian businesspeople that have business contacts with Slovene partners, and the same number of texts written by Slovene businesspeople for their Slovene partners. In this case, therefore, Italian is a tool for international communication, whereas Slovene is used as the language for communication on the domestic market. Bearing these important differences in mind, various trends and English-language elements may be present in both receptor languages analyzed (Italian and Slovene). However, the differences or similarities in the use of Anglicisms between the two languages can also be ascribed to the diversity of texts that emerges at the linguistic and pragmatic level: the collected texts display a wide range of differences in length (short vs. long), topic (offer, request, complaint, etc.), number of recipients (one vs. more), relationship between the sender and recipient (formal vs. informal), and medium (letter, fax, or e-mail). Taking these differences into consideration, this paper sheds light on the factors that stimulate the use of Anglicisms in the texts studied-
Keywords
Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed
PeerReviewed
Date
2012
Extent
941