Selfi, the Spanish adaptation of the anglicism selfie, is the word of the year for the Urgent Spanish Foundation.
“We are not looking for the prettiest word or the most original or innovative. We want to our word of the year, in addition to being related to current affairs and, therefore, having been very present in the media, has a certain linguistic interesteither because of their training or because of the strength of their penetration into common language”, explains the general director of the Foundation, Joaquín Muller.
«Thus, we chose between words that, due to their novelty, creative or adaptive process, due to their reappearance or recovery, have been the subject of one of the more than three hundred recommendations that the Fundéu BBVA has launched throughout 2014,» he added. . The phenomenon of photos that citizens take of themselvesgenerally with mobile devices, and which are then often shared on public or private networks, has been all the rage in recent years all over the world.
Not in vain, selfie, the English term with which this type of image is known, was already chosen word of the year by the editors of the Oxford dictionaries in 2013 after calculating that its use among English speakers had grown by 17,000 percent in that period.
The Fundéu BBVA, in its work to promote the proper use of Spanish in the media, already advised in December 2013 possible alternatives to the fashionable Anglicism: selfie or the already consolidated self-portraitwell-formed words in Spanish that can be useful to avoid the abuse of the English term.
«But the Spanish language has more resources, in addition to the creation or choice of alternatives, and one of them, quite frequent, is the incorporation of loanwords from other languages adjusting their spelling to our orthographic systemas was the case back in the day, for example, with standard, from standard English,» explains Muller.
So in October 2014 the Fundéu proposed selfi, without the final e of the English original, as a valid adaptation to Spanish. In its recommendation on that term, it was explained that the proper plural is selfies and that, as long as the majority use opts for the masculine or feminine, it can be considered an ambiguous word in terms of gender (el/la selfie), such as el/ the sea, the frame and many others.
«Evidence of the overwhelming use of the anglicized selfie led us to believe that, without giving up our previous advice to use selfie, it would be good to propose an adaptationwhich also in this case did not offer problems from the point of view of pronunciation or graphic representation, «adds Muller.
Do you prefer to write ‘selfie’ or its Spanish version ‘selfi’?
Taken from Fundeu