Phonetically Based Corpora for Anglicisms: A Tijuana–San Diego Contact Outcome

Research in Loanword Phonology has extensively examined the adaptation processes of Anglicisms into recipient languages. In the Tijuana–San Diego border region, where English and Spanish have reciprocally existed, Anglicisms exhibit two main phonetic patterns: some structures exhibit Spanish phonetic properties, while others preserve English phonetic features. This study analyzes 131 vowel tokens drawn from spontaneous conversations with 28 bilingual speakers in Tijuana, recruited via the sociolinguistic ‘friend-of-a-friend’ approach. Specifically, it focuses on monosyllabic Anglicisms with monophthongs by examining the F1 and F2 values using Praat. The results were compared with theoretical vowel targets in English and Spanish through Euclidean distance analysis. Dispersion plots generated in R further illustrate the acoustic distribution of vowel realizations. The results reveal that some vowels closely match Spanish targets, others align with English, and several occupy intermediate acoustic spaces. Based on these patterns, the study proposes two phonetically based corpora—Phonetically Adapted Anglicisms (PAA) and Phonetically Non-Adapted Anglicisms (PNAA)—to capture the nature of Anglicisms in this contact setting. This research offers an empirically grounded basis for cross-dialectal comparison and language contact studies from a phonetically based approach.