Oh wait: English pragmatic markers in Spanish football chatspeak Isabel Balteiro * Departamento de Filología Inglesa, Universidad de Alicante, Spain article info Article history: Available online xxx Keywords: Pragmatic borrowing Pragmatic discourse markers Weak language contact Code-switching Chatspeak abstract This article accounts for a case of pragmatic borrowing in a weak or casual language contact situation where English is a foreign language for the recipient language commu- nity, Spanish. The study describes and analyzes representative and specific examples of one English pragmatic discourse phraseological marker, namely, oh wait, in a sample of spontaneous synchronic comments made by football followers in Spanish football chats. The main purpose is to gain new insights into the use and distribution of oh wait in Spanish by focusing on its spelling variations, distribution, semantic and mainly pragmatic meanings and functions. The analysis shows that chat participants consciously resort to this foreign pragmatic marker as an ironic device with multiple simultaneous functions which affect the four levels of chat conversations, namely, the interaction or conversation itself, the previous statement or utterance, the other participants or interlocutors, and the user, participant or writer him/herself. © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The undeniable worldwide spread of the English language and, consequently, its establishment and general acknowl- edgment as both a global language and a lingua franca have entailed (speakers') unavoidable contact and interaction with other languages. English is nowadays recognized as a dominant, but also attractive e and even necessary e language in international communication, but also within individual communities of non-native English speakers in foreign countries. An important distinction in this respect is made between the use of English in intense or direct contact settings, on the one hand, and weak or indirect ones, on the other (see Kachru, 1986; Ortigosa and Otheguy, 2007; Onysko, 2009; Wolf and Polzenhagen, 2009). In Europe and some parts of Asia, that is, in weak or casual contact locations, the Internet, radio, tele- vision and mass media in general are the primary channels of contact (see Onysko and Winter-Froemel, 2011; Androutso- poulos, 2012) with English. English is “the” foreign language par excellence, with no (co-)official status but with a widely acknowledged social prestige, known by most speakers, especially young generations, who may have either a good or average knowledge of the language. Even those with a very low command of the English language may be able to use certain English expressions, since they have been exposed to them and are able to repeat them in given contexts such as in Internet communication. The result of this is the borrowing of linguistic items which are introduced into the recipient language at * Departamento de Filología Inglesa, Universidad de Alicante, Apdo. 99, 03080 Alicante, Spain. E-mail address: balteiro@ua.es. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2018.03.011 0378-2166/© 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Journal of Pragmatics xxx (2018) 1e11 Please cite this article in press as: Balteiro, I., Oh wait: English pragmatic markers in Spanish football chatspeak, Journal of Pragmatics (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2018.03.011