Los criterios aplicados en el DRAE 2014 a los extranjerismos crudos: Revisión crítica

Abstract

A new edition of the Diccionario de la lengua española (DRAE) usually raises numerous questions, both among the language user and the language scholar, about the changes that the Real Academia introduces. In this paper I examine a group of lemmas in italics, as established in academic dictionaries from 2001 up to the 23rd edition of the DRAE in 2014: the raw foreign words, characterized by not following the graphic-phonic rules of Spanish, the number of which increases to 344 in the new dictionary. On the basis of certain criteria set out in the preamble to the DRAE (those related to foreign words and variants), my aim is to assess how they are applied in the body of work and if a consistent treatment of these words is achieved. Simultaneously, I compare the latest two editions of DRAE in respect of these parameters. The analysis demonstrates that it remains difficult to understand the reasons why the Academy chooses to use italics or roman in certain lemmas, a difficulty increased by the lack of information on their pronunciation. Furthermore, there is an increase in foreign words that refer to an adaptation or to an equivalent. As for variants, some changes in the choice of the preferred form are observed.