The anglicisms saturating Colombian Spanish, metropolitan French and corporate Italian are neither accidents of cultural contact nor evidence of the adaptive richness of Romance languages. They are, above all, a technology of social classification. Their primary function is not to name realities that the native vocabulary could not designate, but to signal belonging and mark the boundary between those who speak the language of the commanding world and those who do not. In Colombia, where the class fracture is simultaneously economic and symbolic, the anglicism functions as an invisible pass, displayed by those who have the right to circulate in certain professional spaces, while its absence expels the others without anyone needing to pronounce the exclusion. The effectiveness of the mechanism lies in its tacit character. No manual, no decree. Only reproduction.
The code and its guardians
A meeting in Bogotá, 2024. The director convenes his team to discuss branding, refine the pitch, define KPIs and schedule a strategic alignment workshop. Of the nine people present, four do not know the precise meaning of KPIs. None asks. The meeting continues.
Pierre Bourdieu described in Distinction (1979) how taste, language and consumption patterns function as markers of position in social space, not to communicate in the neutral sense of the word but to indicate where one stands in the hierarchy. The contemporary anglicism operates with a logic that goes beyond language contact. It does not arrive because no equivalent existed in Spanish or French. It arrives because the English word carries with it a symbolic capital that the equivalent word does not possess. Feedback means nothing that retroalimentación or retour could not say. But feedback sounds global, technical, efficient. The native equivalent sounds like an eighties manual. The choice between the two is not linguistic. It is a matter of class.
In Colombia, the phenomenon takes on a particular texture. The educational fracture is more pronounced than in Europe, the distance between classes more visible, and access to English-language training remains a decisive marker of social origin. Those who attended a private bilingual school, completed a postgraduate degree abroad or work for a multinational handle these terms with ease. Those who have had no access to any of these trajectories encounter them as opaque obstacles in meetings, institutional emails and management documents. The anglicism, in that context, is not merely a word. It is a silent reminder of who belongs and who does not. An entire generation of Colombians under thirty consumes its leisure, its models of success and a large part of its information in English, through platforms whose interface terminology consists of installed anglicisms: feed, story, reel, trending, challenge. For them, these words are not borrowings. They are the natural vocabulary of a world where content that matters arrives in English and content in Spanish is, with rare exceptions, derivative or secondary. Adoption is not conscious. It is environmental. And the environmental is the hardest to see and the most effective as a mechanism of cultural reproduction.
The NGO sector illustrates the mechanism with almost clinical clarity. Any organisation working with vulnerable communities manages internally an Anglo-Saxon vocabulary that its beneficiaries will never encounter. Terms such as advocacy, accountability, capacity building and gender mainstreaming require no translation because they will never be addressed directly to the communities. Reports are drafted in Spanish for communities and in English for donors. Knowledge circulates upward, toward Northern funders. Control flows downward. Conditions are not negotiated.
Language functions as a uniform. Wearing it well is declaring one’s belonging to the world that commands. Failing to master it is exhibiting, involuntarily, a distance that no professional promotion can entirely compensate.
According to estimates from the Instituto Cervantes (Spanish in the World, 2024), Spanish encompasses more than 500 million native speakers but represents approximately 5% of available content on the internet, compared to 52% for English. This disproportion does not reflect a demographic difference but a difference in economic and technological power.
The profitable emptiness
There is a second function of the anglicism, distinct from though frequently overlapping with the class marker. It is the simulation of content. The Anglo-Saxon management vocabulary (mindset, pivot, agile, roadmap, sprint) operates as a system of signals that substitutes for thought rather than expressing it. Each term originates in a specific technical context where it had concrete precision. Transplanted outside that context and generalised as a descriptor of any organisational process, it loses all precision and retains only its value as a signal of belonging. The person who says their company needs a more open mindset is not describing any specific cognitive process but declaring a cultural affiliation with a diffuse ecosystem of values drawn from North American business schools. The term does not designate. It exhibits.
The Fundéu RAE and the Académie française have attempted to propose equivalents in their respective languages, with limited success. France enacted the Toubon Law in 1994, prohibiting the use of foreign terms in official documents and advertising when a French equivalent exists. A list of official technological terms has been periodically updated since 2013 by the Commission d’enrichissement de la langue française. The result remains an uncomfortable coexistence between regulation and practice. French engineers say software, journalists say hashtag, and the law names the problem without resolving the mechanism that produces it.
In Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s government backed a 2023 bill proposing fines of up to one hundred thousand euros for officials using English terms when an Italian equivalent exists. The proposal was read in most international media primarily as an episode of right-wing linguistic nationalism, which simplifies the problem. Institutional resistance to anglicisms can be conservative, but it can also be an inclusion policy, a way of ensuring that public space remains legible to all citizens and not only to those who have had the training necessary to navigate the language of the global market. In Colombia and the rest of Latin America, no equivalent of any of these initiatives exists. Adoption is uncritical because no institutional framework questions it.
According to the UNESCO Science Report 2021, more than 80% of scientific papers indexed in global academic databases are published in English, including those by Spanish-speaking, French-speaking and Italian-speaking researchers. This pressure is not an informal convention. It is codified in the evaluation systems of universities in almost every country, including Colombia.
The architecture of submission
The terms colonising Spanish, French and Italian do not emerge organically. They are produced by specific institutions, distributed through specific channels and associated with concrete sources of economic power. Silicon Valley, with its universities, investment funds and technology platforms, is the principal lexical laboratory of the contemporary world. Not because anyone decided it should be, but because it is where the capital that finances the tools we all use and the business models we all aspire to replicate is concentrated. The free trade agreement between Colombia and the United States, in force since 2012, contains no language provision. It does not need one. The contracts, technical standards and certification manuals that the agreement puts into circulation arrive in English. Adaptation requires adopting its vocabulary. The language of the agreement is the language of power, and power does not translate.
There is a historical irony in this situation that is rarely named. Spanish was the instrument of linguistic domination that displaced, over two centuries, hundreds of indigenous languages across the American continent. The mechanism was the same. The language of economic and military power becomes the language of knowledge, institutional access and legitimacy, until speaking one’s own tongue implies exclusion from the world that matters. The Conquest did not invent that mechanism. It replicated it on a new continent. And the contemporary world replicates it again, with subtler instruments and without needing armies.
The individual who adopts anglicisms is not, in this framework, a passive agent of cultural domination but someone acting rationally within a system of incentives that rewards adoption and penalises resistance. The Colombian professional who says feedback rather than retroalimentación has not been manipulated. They have calculated, correctly, that the first term opens doors the second does not, that certain work environments read fluency in anglophone vocabulary as a signal of competence and preference for Spanish as a signal of provincialism. Cultural domination works this way, with greater efficiency than open domination, without requiring coercion. It only needs the conditions of access to success to coincide with the conditions of cultural adoption that it itself produces. Adopting it does not require understanding it.
Conclusion
The mechanism this text has attempted to describe requires neither conspiracy nor deliberate policy. It sustains itself, with the efficiency of any system that aligns individual interest with the reproduction of collective hierarchy. The person who adopts Anglo-Saxon vocabulary in Bogotá, Paris or Milan is not thinking about linguistic imperialism but about their next meeting, their next client, their next funding application. They act rationally and, in doing so, reproduce those conditions with greater fidelity than any propagandist.
What remains intact, beneath the veneer of borrowed vocabulary, is the inequality that vocabulary helps to manage. Those who understand and those who do not will continue to sit around the same table. Except the former will have learned not to see the latter, and the latter will have learned not to ask. That is not a language problem. It is a power problem that has found in language one of its most comfortable forms of not needing to name itself. What it administers, in the last analysis, is not only class difference but difference of destiny. And that administration is all the more effective the more natural its instruments appear…
G.S.
Sources
- Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979
- Pierre Bourdieu, Ce que parler veut dire, Fayard, 1982
- Instituto Cervantes, Spanish in the World 2024, annual report
- UNESCO, Science Report 2021
- Toubon Law, Journal officiel de la République française, 1994
- Commission d’enrichissement de la langue française, Vocabulaire des technologies de l’information, 2010–2024
- Proposta di legge italiana n° 1109/2023, Fabio Rampelli, Italian Parliament
Actualizado el 19 de April de 2026
