Anglicism în the economic field

Foreword

As English language has had a lasting influence on languages worldwide, Romanian cannot be an exception, taking in consideration the necessity to make possible an effective communication at all levels of society: social, cultural, economic level. The influence of English on the Romanian language, mainly resulting in numerous borrowings especially in the economic field has determined me to choose it as the topic of my BA thesis.

The development of the private sector, the employers’ requirements for specific communication skills, the economic field division into numerous branches of activity – finance and banking, management, human resources, accounting, international relations, tourism – all such aspects are grounded reasons for the existence of a global economic vocabulary in the Romanian language.

One of the premises determining the need to approach communication in a multilingual context within the business environments in Romania is the increasing development in the economic field and the fact that English is the main language that connects the transformations at this level. Besides the development of economic activities, economic progress equally involves the necessity to specialise in the field namely to understand and to assimilate the specific terminology. Naturally, people looking for extraordinary results, or only for getting hired in the economic field should get acquainted with, learn and adequately use its specific terminology. Just like other specific languages, the economic language makes use of a specialized vocabulary, used predominantly in translations, treaties, textbooks, scientific papers as well as in practical activities.

The main intention of my paper is to outline the phenomenon of Anglicism in Romanian, its significance from different views, the effects and transformations that Romanian suffered while adapting economic terms. I will also emphasize the manner in which these terms were actually adapted and adopted by the Romanian language, but, most important, the necessity of borrowing certain words from English considering the fact that the specialized opinions are divided in two parts providing strong motivations for which we should pay more attention to this phenomenon.

Moreover, my experience as a translator for an international Journal entitled “Cross-Cultural Management” is another strong reason for which I have decided to study thoroughly this issue that has raised great interest for me in order to enhance my knowledge and have a clearer image on this phenomenon in the economic field, especially because the current context of linguistic globalization is in a continuous transformation where every new concept shows us another perspective of analyzing Anglicisims.

Introduction

The influence of English as an international phenomenon, reaching proportions that sometimes are defined as an invasion, is more and more often subject of debate. This intense phenomenon raises problems of adaptation and assimilation to the Romanian language system, and, not least, of semantically incorrect usage.

In the context of globalization, which provides the conditions of the international spread of English as a "lingua franca", Romanian has the capacity to accept a large number of English loans and highlights its creativity through innovations arising from usage. Some of these loans are in a process of adaptation and assimilation in the Romanian language, but others have maintained their English form in both spelling and pronunciation. In Romanian linguistics, the phenomenon of English loans has been studied under various aspects: etymology, phonetics, orthography, morphology, semantics, and stylistics.

Although Anglicisms have been regarded with disapproval by certain linguists the borrowings from English in the economic field, and not only, are a necessity to overcome communication barriers.

A larger scale use of English in our country was determined, after 1989, by a range of economic issues arising from the liberalization of trade, therefore it was directly caused by the same phenomenon of linguistic globalization. In recent years, we have witnessed multinationals setting up in the Romanian geographical space. The advertising they make in the recruitment process shows unreserved use of English. Thus, very often, job vacancies are made in a foreign language, and most of them are in English.

English borrowings in the Romanian language have become numerous nowadays when the whole Romanian society experiences various types of changes especially from an economic, social, and cultural point of view. While more and more people learn English and speak it for different reasons, one could notice the effect it has on the other languages: a great variety of English words and expressions are used while speaking their native language. E. Coşeriu states in “Principiile lingvisticii ca ştiinţã a culturii” 1992, that ‘change in a language, linguistic change, means the dissemination or generalization of an innovation, involving some necessary and subsequent adoptions.