English Loanwords and Lexical Variation on Egyptian Journalistic Texts

With the advent of globalization, English has spread all over the world (Seargeant, 2012, among others). This phenomenon has inevitably led to an unprecedented introduction of English terms also in EFL communities and certainly, it has had a great impact in their ‘glocal’ (Robertson, 1992, 1995, Onysko, 2009; Sharifian, 2013) products such as in social media, TV and radio broadcasting, and newspapers (Varga & Bjelobaba, 2011). This study, which is part of a wider research project, focuses on the use of English loanwords in Egyptian journalistic texts and aims at observing their frequency of use, describing their process of simplification and adaptation, and thus their changes in form (Mohammed & Samad, 2020), and, finally, verifying whether there are variations in their meanings (Al-Athwary, 2016) and functions as well. The research will be carried out along two different lines: firstly, English loanwords will be manually detected and recorded out of a sample of articles taken from the online Arabic version of the newspaper Al-Ahram. This first data collection will be useful to study the frequency of use of English terms in the Arabic texts and their morphological behaviour. Secondly, concordances and cooccurrences will be verified through a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies approach (Partington, Duguid & Taylor, 2013) using Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014) to look for patterns of similarity or contrast in the words surrounding the search term and thus verify whether English loanwords in these articles are used with the same lexical and semantic function.