The influence of the English language on the description of cosmetic products

Abstract

The influence of English as an international language has increased in many areas, from scientific, technological, economic and political fields to cinema, music and advertising. The use of English as a global language has exerted an enormous pressure over languages, especially on the lexical level. Since the second half of the 20th century, many works have already dealt with Anglicisms in Spanish (most cases of recent borrowings) in various fields, including fashion (Balteiro and Campos, 2012) and television cosmetics commercials (Rodríguez Medina, 2016a), but the study of descriptions provided by the brands for their cosmetic products has received less attention in Spanish. This paper provides an analysis of facial cosmetics descriptions selected from a corpus collected in 2016 from four Spanish cosmetic brands. Language creativity exploiting both the use of English borrowings and the influence of the English language in some orthographical patterns related to word-formation processes in Spanish in this genre will be discussed. The proportion of the influence of the English language on this kind of texts may be an important factor in determining its socio-psychological effect on the target public; besides, the quantitative results will be compared with those obtained in our previous studies in the fields of tourism and computing. A qualitative analysis of a selection of examples from our corpus will be offered. The present study intends to illustrate the influence of the English language on the information consumers can read about cosmetic products.