The vocabulary used by young people in Guatemala for naming foodstuffs

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to identify the words used by young people throughout the country to refer to food. To achieve this, a sample of 220 students from the last high school grade in a national school, between 17 and 19 years old, was collected. All of them wrote words referring to food in a maximum of two minutes. The data were edited and analyzed to obtain the frequency with which each word was mentioned; an analysis by subfields was also performed. As a result, a corpus of 398 different words was obtained, of which 22 were said by at least 57 young people: chicken, meat, bean, carrot, rice, apple, egg, milk, tomato, bread, potato, vegetable, broth, tortilla, onion, cheese, güisquil, fish, fruit, banana, watermelon, and pear. These words have a high coincidence with the results of other studies carried out in Guatemala. All the words identified were categorized into subfields: salty prepared food, sweet prepared food and breads, beverages, vegetables and greens, fruits, dairy products, sausages, knick-knacks, and miscellaneous foods. Of these, the most productive is “salty food”, which evidences the consumption of corn-based prepared foods and foods from Europe, China, and the United States, among others. The study shows examples of the lexicalization of some commercial brands and identifies some lexical and orthographic variants that may be useful to provide guidance in educational centers and enrich some lexicographic works