Anglicismos no português brasileiro: um estudo sociolinguístico em tweets do Oeste Catarinense

Abstract

The loanword is the incorporation of a foreign word into the receiving language, while foreignness is an allochthonous term or expression that is not incorporated into the receiving language. The neologism, in turn, is a language derived from new words or derived from existing words, which may or may not be the same. The internet makes communication possible without borders and much faster than the conventional means of communication. The present work aimed to describe and analyze, from a sociolinguistic perspective, the insertion of words from the English language in tweets in cyberwriting in Portuguese. Considering the fast changes in the cyber environment and the speed with which individuals exchange information, this synchronous study is necessary to identify (or not) an increasing trend in loanwords and anglicisms in Brazilian Portuguese. Our sample consisted of 50 Twitter users, selected through an advanced search available on the social network itself. A total of 2450 anglicisms of publications on the social network Twitter, written by users located in the western region of Santa Catarina, posted by users between March 2019 and February 2020, that is, before the declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic; and, in the second, considering the need for isolation and social distance, which made many changes in a professional and academic activities, were collected tweets published by users between March 2020 and February 2021. Our hypothesis was that, because of the Covid-19 pandemic, there was an increase in the use of anglicisms as a consequence of the increase in remote work and study and the use of virtual technological resources in the second course. From the quantitative analysis of our sample data, carried out using the R software (R CORE TEAM, 2020), it was found that of the seven independent variables controlled, only three were selected as significant: the linguistic variables assimilation or not of terms foreign to the Portuguese linguistic system and morphological class of anglicisms and the social variable age of the Twitter users in the sample. In summary, the results revealed that: there was an increase in the use of anglicisms in the second course analyzed; non-assimilated and non-dictionary lexical items were the most recurrent; foreign words are more frequent in relation to loans and neologisms in the sample in both time courses; the noun was the morphological class with the highest number of occurrences; men wrote more than women in both time courses; the younger ones used more anglicisms than the older ones in both time courses; Chapecó is the microregion with the highest number of occurrences; university students are the ones that most use anglicisms in the sample extracted from Twitter users.