I made it about a month abroad without Starbucks. It’s not like I’m an addict, but considering there are at least four within half a mile of Seville’s most important plaza, it was no easy feat. It was during my first transgression that I made a not-so-shocking discovery: Spaniards drink Starbucks too.
The affirmation that at least my experience wouldn’t be entirely American made me feel a little more comfortable with ordering a latte, but it was strangely the multilingual menu that has made me a cliente habitual. In the quest for a truly authentic experience abroad, I’ve been sucked right back into the guilty pleasures of American life, and language isn’t helping.
Lexical loans, those borrowed foreign words you need not italicize because they’re in our dictionaries, are one of the quirkier aspects of cross-cultural communication, and you don’t have to spend a semester abroad to notice them. They can pop up as proper nouns, brand names or when one language lacks a name for a foreign invention and adopts the original rather than a translation. We have plenty in English: laissez-faire, aficionado, sauerkraut, guerilla and nachos, to name just a few.
Sometimes loan words are real manifestations of the effects of globalization, like WiFi or Times New Roman; other times, they’re embarrassing reminders of the kinds of things we’re attracted to in other cultures. In either case, they can serve as an amusing source of comfort for anyone abroad.
Take Starbucks. As soon as I walk through the sliding door, I’m greeted by a shelf of pastries that seem to be going through a cultural identity crisis. I can choose between an espresso brownie, a classic roll de canela (cinnamon), a skinny muffin de arándanos (blueberries) and a cookie de chocolate. And not only am I offered an alternative to the notoriously unfulfilling, tiny glass of Spanish coffee, I’m offered three: tall, grande and venti, a well-known potpourri of loanwords, depending on where in the world you get your caffeine fix.
The only tricky part about making my order is accounting for the adaptations Spanish speakers have made to the loans. Just as we make a phonological compromise between English and Spanish when we order a quesadilla — with the exception of Grandma’s “kay-suh-dil-a” in “Napoleon Dynamite” — I have to avoid using my English vowels unless I want a quizzical look from the barista.
The borrowed words and phrases that make me cringe are those straight out of English language pop culture lexicon. Open a magazine or turn on a TV, and you’ll likely run into the phrases “personal shopper,” “top model,” “topless” or “breakdance,” among others. “Stripper” is often transformed into “streapper,” in what I can only guess is a confused attempt to ease pronunciation. Spice Girls and U2 serve sometimes as loans and other times as loan translations when they appear as “Las Chicas Picantes” and “U dos,” respectively.
People’s conceptions of languages and their relative power are formed by a number of factors. Still, I find it amazing that English can carry so much linguistic prestige around the world, when half of the words Spaniards are familiar with refer either to consumer culture or scantily clad women.
Maybe it seems silly that I have to look to a Starbucks menu or a cyber café for reminders that the world is slowly filling with cultural and linguistic overlaps. But it’s those everyday examples that demonstrate what we’re gaining as American students — and maybe what we have to prove — by making a cultural exchange.
Beth Shook is a junior in the college and a former copy editor for The Hoya. She can be reached at shook@thehoya.com. Found in Translation appears every other Friday in The Guide.