Presence of anglicisms in scientific journalism: The coronavirus case

Abstract

In recent years, English wields a very important influence on the medical languages of the vast majority of cultures as a consequence of the economic, political and military supremacy of the United States, which endangers the creation of scientific discourses written in other languages. As a consequence of this preponderance, linguistic phenomena such as neologisms, borrowings, calques or false friends can be observed in current medical Spanish, which have been the subject of numerous studies and which, according to their authors, threaten the basic pillars of all scientific language, i.e. precision, correctness, clarity and conciseness. Given that English is the usual language of journalistic information sources, lack of linguistic knowledge leads to serious terminological errors being made and encouraged, which appear in the press and cause changes in the way in which citizens express themselves in their mother tongue. The aim of this paper is to study the presence of Anglicisms in peninsular Spanish scientific journalism in the context of the coronavirus crisis that monopolised most of the pages of all the world’s newspapers. To this end, we have analysed the articles on the coronavirus in three of the newspapers (El Mundo, ABC and El País) with the highest national circulation during the years 2020 and 2021 according to data obtained from Comscore, years in which the pandemic caused an increase in the consumption of digital media. After verifying that the presence of anglicisms is overwhelming through a very considerable number of examples, other terminological proposals are offered based on correctness and, most especially, on the linguistic precision and rigour that all medical discourse requires, as stated in the lexicographical repertoires of the main authorities on medical discourse.