Saturday, November 23, 2013

Texting Speak + Cross-Language Pollination + Morphology = New Words

So the other day in a dopey article I grabbed from a Spanish teen magazine for students to look at, I discovered the Spanish word "BeFa" (also spelled "befa"). From context, I had a gut feeling it meant "best friend," which a Puertorican student confirmed for me.

This word is awesome: it derives from "BF" (English internet/texting speak for best friend). I assume (dangerous, I know) that this happened in the following way:

BF - borrowed form from English
be efe
- borrowing as pronounced in Spanish
befe - new word form from fusing the two letters. Spanish phonetic rules don't distinguish between double vowels between words and single ones (this is how "ten te en pie" becomes tentempié, for example)
befes - new plural word form based on Spanish morphological rules for creating a plural
befa - new playful Spanish feminine form, based on Spanish morphological rules for creating a feminine form. This is highly unusual, however, because usually words ending in "e" do not change form for gender.
befas - new plural feminine form.

Quick google searches seem to confirm that ="befe" (m), "befes" (m), "befa" (f) and "befas" (f) all exist as forms in Spanish. Google also confirms that my proposed intermediate forms "BF"and "be efe" also exist, as well as "mi be efe efe" and "mi be efe efe efe" which suggests that some speakers think the extra "f" in "bff" serves as an intensifier rather than standing for "forever." Some other hybrids that exist but are rarer are "BFa" and "BFas." I was able to find only a handful of hits for "mis be efes" and none for "mis bes efes," suggesting that the whole "BF" is taken as a word and not as two words.

Google ngrams, alas, has yet to capture the phenomenon in print -- I'd love to have an up-to-date Google ngrams like tool for internet text as well as print.
Question: what other texting words are likely to have crossed over into Spanish?