It is enough to go around any YouTube or Twitch channel of those that are eating the toast of television in the younger generations to realize that language in the digital world is expanding at an exponential rate in terms of linguistic loans. refers. Any streamer will speak naturally bait who launched in the last RAID what has he done in the Moba Fashion. Unfortunately, a camper made him a headshot while railed to a friend and dropped all your equipment. a pity git gud for next time, friend.
We are not just talking about neologisms. If you stop to listen, you will realize that there are also Spanish verbs that were in disuse and continue to grow due to their similarity to the English formula. Banear is gaining ground to block, cancel to proscribe or the balanced noun is growing to the detriment of balanced. Calling “brother” to those we used to call “uncle” would give for another article.
Then there are the words —often verbs— that take an English concept and decline it with the rules of Spanish: ban (of banban), bug (of bugworm, wormy, buggy), farm (of farmfarm, used to talk about collecting resources instead of advancing the plot of a game), chetar (of cheatcheat, use tricks), own (of own, possess, when someone is much better than his opponents). And many more examples: respawn, glitch… By the way, all those invented verbs are conjugated first, paying attention to the genius of the language that Álex Grijelmo speaks.
Language is an economic system and English is a synthetic language, which would explain why we use boost instead of “temporary enhancement of capabilities” or we accept the acronym for convenience: FPS (first person shootera first-person shooter) or PVP (player versus player, games or game modes in which two players face each other). But, although the temptation to justify neologisms is great, we must not fool ourselves: having the same words, if we use boss (referring to the main enemy of a phase or a game) instead of “boss” it is by pure inertia, abandonment or fashion. Come on, what’s more cool (or is it more cool). However, the generational hack is fertilizer for reciprocal reproaches. So to the (boomers) who say that the new generations should speak better Spanish, it could be replied that they do not lose anything for visiting one of the multiple dictionaries gamer spread over the net.
More information
The French Government (from Légifrance, the Executive’s website for the public dissemination of legislative and regulatory texts) has published a lexical manual with recommendations for the use of terms related to the world of video games. France, so attentive to cultural movements, has decided to take the bull by the horns, assume that the digital phenomenon is as unstoppable as it is generationally imposed, and try to harness the overwhelming force of English in the virtual sphere.
Thus, according to the Elysee, streamer should be avoided and used instead joueur en direct; F2P (the abbreviation for free-to-playfree game) is less preferable than jeu video en accès gratuit; e-sport should be replaced by game video of competition; early pass by access anticipated or DLC (from downloadable contentvideo game expansions) by telechargeable extension.
We said that you only need to shop around the internet to see that our language has succumbed to neologisms. It is curious, because Spanish, according to the Observatory of the linguistic and cultural diversity of the internet directed by Professor Daniel Pimienta, consolidates its position as the third digital language every day. According to its 2022 report, English continues to be the first language on the Internet (25% of the Internet is in English, but it is experiencing a relative decline compared to the 30% indicated in the previous report, from 2017), followed by Chinese ( fifteen%). Spanish is in third place with 7.9% of the total content, a considerable increase compared to the 7.3% it occupied in 2017.
If we add data and observation, the conclusion is simple: the use of Spanish on the global internet is growing as much as the use of Anglicisms within Spanish. With this clear, there is only one thing left: decide if we will call that promotion level up or level up.
You can follow BABELIA on Facebook Y Twitteror sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.