Exploring the Canarian contribution to the Hispanicism in English

Abstract

The Canary Islands (Spain) have always been in close contact with the Anglo-Saxon world, which has had important consequences for the economy but has also meant a significant influence at the socio-cultural, linguistic and literary levels. A review of the English bibliography on the Canaries reveals, among other aspects, a tendency in most authors to use Hispanicisms and Canarianisms in their texts. This article offers a record of the Spanish and Canarian words which appear in a corpus of fourteen works taken from an extensive bibliography, namely twelve travel books and two tourist guides published between 1851 and 1917. Besides providing an overview of the studies on Hispanicisms in English, this paper’s main aim is to highlight the contribution of Canarian Spanish to the enrichment of the vocabulary of the English language by checking which of the Hispanicisms in our corpus which are actually Canarianisms have been included in the lexical repertoire of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2007).