Actitudes del estudiante universitario hacia el uso de la ortografía anglicada

Abstract

The demonization of anglicisms, particularly by linguists and lexicographers, has led to a wide scope of attitudes as far as use and diastratic/diaphasic marks are concerned, which suggests a tight linkbetween a speech community and speakers’ attitudes. The present study is aimed at exploring the attitudes of one of these speech communities, university studentship, towards the graphemic adaptation of anglicisms. A university student is precisely a reflection of the merged realization of modern times, and their referential changes, and the university as an emblem of academic institutions, and its traditional and standardized rules of text production. This dichotomy is even more palpable when it comes down to the use of anglicized language as it is in fact the discernible side of this switching process. The lack of a standardization system has an impact on educative deficiencies, especially during the processes of tutor guidance and orientation owing to an unawareness of the actual students’ attitudes towards anglicized graphemes. Anglicisms, as a result of a globalized society, have been easy to spot in the slangy and colloquial language of youngsters, and its deep-rooted use in thelanguage is particularly significant as to the various levels of spelling adaptation. For a more accurate typology of linguistic attitudes, we have decided to carry out a questionnaire-based study, whichmight help us collect and quantify the data, according to the respondent’s profile (socioeconomic, family, and academic traits), and their individualized perception of anglicized spelling, and theirpossible ‘correction’. Therefore, and taking into account that both personal and professional scopes are necessary for an attitudinal study, the questionnaire has been divided into three major parts: (1)poll-taker’s characteristics (academic formation, university degree, accredited level of English, sex, etc.); (2) categorization of utterances containing English-induced spelling (adapted or not) and sevenclassification criteria (I have read it, I have not read it, its spelling is incorrect, its spelling is correct, I write it frequently, I hardly ever write it, I have never written it); (3) identification of typographicalmarks (italics, underlining, inverted commas, etc.), and their degree of acceptance. Once these data have been processed, questionnaires could provide us with relevant evidence on speaker’s nature,and determine somehow the factors that are highly influential on the graphemic accommodation of anglicized loanwords, leading to a compilation of the similar features Spanish university studentsare characterized by. This research would allow us to have a better understanding of the diversity of linguistic attitudes in higher-education students, and its importance relies on the adequacy of upcoming academic materials, and the standardization of writing styles, above all in publications and research works. University lecturers or professors could count on a tool enabling them to distinguish the level of acceptance of anglicized spelling, and then to create teaching mechanisms, not necessarily to correct those deep-rooted attitudes, but rather to supervise and guide university students in the production and elucidation of academic texts.