EL PREDOMINIO DEL INGLÉS EN EL LENGUAJE CIENTÍFICO: CARACTERÍSTICAS DEL LENGUAJE MÉDICO ESPAÑOL EN LA ACTUALIDAD

Abstract

English has undoubtedly become over the last decades the language par excellence of international scientific community, even taking the place of other most important languages such as French or German. Spanish scientific language has also succumbed to the influence of English on different scientific and technical disciplines and presents since a few decades some features not included in the grammatical rules of Spanish which are the logical consequence of a linguistic change derived from the introduction of English. This article aims at analysing the characteristics of medical language as we find it in Spanish publications. Thus we have divided the article into three sections: first of all, a description of medical language history in order to understand the development of this language. Secondly, an analysis of the main lexical, semantic, syntactic and phonetic features of Spanish medical language to describe the influence of English, and finally an analysis of the procedures used to create medical terms and how they affect the linguistic development of the terminology.