Estrangeirismo na língua portuguesa: o uso de anglicismos na rede social do Twitter do Brasil

Abstract

Being a world language, English is widely used in many sectors of society, in different languages around the world. English language has reached the current status of a world language due to the political, economic and cultural domination of English-speaking countries, especially the United Kingdom and the United States. As English vocabulary makes its way into more languages at a seemingly increasing pace, resistance against English hegemony grows in many countries, such as France and Brazil. In the case of Brazil, the ‘exaggerated’ and indiscriminate use of ‘foreignisms’, is commonly seen as a reflection of colonization, which would lead to the takeover of the local culture. With the COVID-19 pandemic, it is our impression that the use of the imported English vocabulary may have increased. Despite this growing perception, there is no empirical research looking at the incidence of the borrowing of English vocabulary in Brazilian Portuguese. Thus, this work aims to analyze the frequency of English words on the social network Twitter from 2019 to 2022. To meet this goal, a corpus was collected comprising tweets from 200 different users, broken down into groups or domains, namely 50 government users, 50 influencers, 50 corporations and 50 ‘ordinary’ people, from January 2019 to October 2022. The theory and method for the current project are based on Corpus Linguistics, a sub-discipline of Linguistics geared toward the collection and analysis of large amounts of text using computational technology (BERBER SARDINHA, 2004). In addition to the corpus of tweets created specifically for this project, other English and Portuguese language corpora were used to enable the (semi-)automatic identification of English borrowings in the tweets. The tools used in the analysis include the snscrape package for scraping the tweets, a script developed for the project by the supervisor, and the SAS package for statistical analysis. The research questions were as follows: “What is the mean frequency of English borrowings in Twitter posts written in Brazilian Portuguese?”; “Is there a difference of frequency in the use of English words across the different domains?”; “Is there a difference of frequency across the individual users?”; and “Is there diachronic variation in the use of English borrowings, by year, and between pre-pandemic and pandemic time frames?”. The results provided answers to these questions, which are presented in the report