ORCID
https://orcid.org/0009-0002-1901-5344
Date of Award
Spring 2025
Language
English
Embargo Period
5-1-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
College/School/Department
Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures
Program
Spanish
First Advisor
Lotfi Sayahi
Committee Members
Sara Zahler, Cynthia Fox
Keywords
contact linguistics, language contact, lexical borrowing, computer mediated communication
Subject Categories
Spanish Linguistics
Abstract
The field of contact linguistics has investigated numerous sites of contact between languages and the resulting phenomena (Poplack et al.; 1988, for example); however, there remain many contact sites that have yet to be analyzed. The present dissertation views the lexical evidence of language contact between English and Spanish via the medium of live-streamed tabletop role-playing games. These games, often lacking accessible translations in languages other than English, have become a popular pastime over the last decade, which has increased the amount of contact between the two languages. Dungeons and Dragons, a roleplaying game which typically deals with fantasy elements, contains many lexical items that are either particular to the genre, the game itself, or generally unfamiliar to a Spanish-speaking audience. These words often lack a Spanish translation and therefore require Spanish speakers to employ various strategies to adapt them to their language.
Using archived live streams of Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, played in Spanish by Mexican Twitch streamer Mario Ortegón and a rotating cast (Ortegón; n.d.), two corpora were created to measure sociolinguistic variation of contact phenomena usage and the impact of English Lexical Insertions concerning the efficiency hypothesis (Shin 2010). Analysis of the data reveals that the lexical adaptation strategies of speakers were highly variable, demonstrating individual variance and significant conditioning by extralinguistic factors such as Role, Game Knowledge, and Group. Concerning efficiency, the findings support the hypothesis that speakers will make use of English Lexical Insertions in situations where doing so represents greater lexical efficiency.
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Sims, Ethan, "Emergent Sites of Language Contact: Lexical Borrowing by Mexican Bilingual Speakers in Live-streamed Tabletop Games" (2025). Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present). 177.
https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/etd/177