Anglicisms in the informal speech of Norwegian and Chilean adolescents

This article analyses the use of anglicisms in two conversations from two corpora of informal adolescent language, the UNO-corpus from Oslo, Norway, and de COLAs corpus from Santiago, Chile. The speakers are boys at the age of 14 with a middle/lower middle class background. The study shows that the use of anglicisms in both conversations is limited, but that the topic of the conversations influences the number of anglicisms. It also shows that anglicims in the process of integration do integrate both phonetically and morphologically, while those that are not integrated tend to maintain their foreign pronunciation. The analysis is based on the functional theory suggested by Halliday (1978). In the selected conversations, most of the anglicisms are nouns used to name new items that lack a name in the borrowing language, what Halliday calls the ideational function, used to define the external world. Anglicisms are also used with an interpersonal function, expressing feelings towards the other participants in the conversation and finally to fulfil the textual function, creating variation in the text.