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September 10, 2025Languages2 citationsOpen Access

Colloquialization Processes in the 20th Century: The Role of Discourse Markers in the Evolution of Sports Announcer Talk in Peninsular Spanish

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SJShima Salameh Jiménez

Key Points

  • The study shows a significant increase in the use of discourse markers by sports announcers, marking a shift in style.
  • Results indicate that between 1980 and 2024, the employment of informal discourse markers has grown, contrasting past formal styles.
  • This analysis is based on a corpus of radio and TV broadcasts of football matches in Spain, detailing changes over decades.
  • Findings highlight how colloquialization in sports broadcasting may affect audience engagement and language evolution.

Abstract

This paper analyzes 20th century colloquialization processes in Peninsular Spanish, in line with recent works addressing mass-media colloquialization. Previous studies suggest a change in sports-talk announcing towards a more informal model, which is supported by the incorporation of new linguistic features as well as by the influence of some external changes. In this context, this study delves into the role of discourse markers as a colloquialization parameter, as a growth in their employment has been detected since ca. 1990. To further explore the data, a manually compiled corpus has been transcribed and analyzed: our corpus consists of both radio and TV football-match recordings aired in Spain from 1980 to 2000 and from 2000 to 2024. These two big periods have been subdivided into five-year periods or micro-diachronies to allow for a more detailed analysis. Results reveal a consolidation of the use of discourse markers by sports announcers, contrasting with earlier broadcasts that tended to avoid them or that employed more formal discourse markers, typically related to written, planned discourses.

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Cite This Study

Shima Salameh Jiménez (2025) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/68c1bd4854b1d3bfb60eed72https://doi.org/10.3390/languages10070172
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