Barbarisms are linguistic vices that consist of mispronouncing or misspelling certain words, or using inappropriate words, believing they have a certain meaning when in fact they have another. For example: naides, guevo, fuistes.
The Spanish language (like all others) has a series of resources to make communication, whether oral or written , effective, which partly depends on the recipient correctly understanding or decoding the messages.
Most people in school acquire the basic lexical and normative knowledge that governs their language and are able to construct words and sentences when speaking and writing appropriately.
It may be useful to you:
- Lexical families
- Slang
- Regional lexicon and generational lexicon
- Localisms (from different countries)
- Neologisms
- Xenisms
Examples of barbarisms
Here are some very common barbarisms listed as examples, with the corresponding clarification of which is the correct word:
- ‘You bought’for ‘you bought’.
- ‘Guevo’for egg
- ‘Inauguration’for inauguration
- ‘Nobodies’for no one
- ‘Picsa’for pizza
- ‘Question’for question
- ‘Interperie’for open air
- ‘You went’for you went
- ‘ Both two‘ for both
- ‘Jrito’for fried
- ‘ He threw him out‘ for he threw him out (he told him to leave)
- ‘Hebrew’for Israeli (born in Israel)
- ‘Pouring’for pouring
- ‘Hindu’for Indian (born in India)
- ‘Trompezar’for tripping
- ‘Addiction’for addiction
- ‘Exepto’for except
- He is a ‘layman’in the subject (meaning he is not an expert on that topic, but it is often used to mean the opposite)
- ‘Libido’for libido
- ‘There were’for there was
Characteristics of barbarisms
The concept of barbarism often has a pejorative connotation because, if we look at its etymology, barbaric has to do with violence, rusticity, or carelessness, and conveys the idea that barbarism will be used by those people included in the rather lower sociocultural strata, not endowed with the linguistic competence to identify the correct paths of language.
However, in many cases, barbarisms merely follow the general rules of language and apply them to cases where they are arbitrarily inappropriate, so confusion is the most common outcome.
It is no coincidence that barbarisms are:
- Typical mistakes made by children. For example:I stumbled (instead of I tripped )
- Incorrect verb conjugations. For example:I know (instead of I know) orDon’t fall (instead of Don’t fall )
- Poorly constructed plurals.For example: My feet hurt(instead of My feet hurt )
- Certain demonymic adjectives. In these cases, there is an additional problem, which is that the same proper name of a locality in its shortened version (for example: Santiago) can refer to different cities ( del Estero, S. de Chile, S. de Compostela ), and these assume different gentiles: santiagueño, santiaguino and santiaguense , respectively.
Other barbarisms
The other idea of barbarism has more to do with the essence of the term and corresponds to those words that are used incorrectly simply due to ignorance of their correct spelling, pronunciation, or meaning.
It is clear that the most immediate origin of these barbarisms is the intergenerational transmission of these mispronounced or misused words, which will then be repeated with the same error.
In some cases, barbarisms are more closely linked to the typical pronunciations of a certain region and the influence of other languages in multicultural societies, which adds another factor in determining the typical error.
