Abstract: The aim of this study is to characterize a number of features of loan words in
contemporary Brazilian Portuguese. The examples come not only from the written
press (newspapers and magazines) but also from a corpus of specialized and
popularized publications in the field of economics. In the general language corpus, a
systematic study of new words appearing in the printed media since 1993 shows that
coinages in the native language are far more frequent than loans. For special
languages, especially for popular economics, are often rendered by Portuguese
expressions, or followed up by a definition. In specialised texts, it can be shown that borrowings are well integrated as they produce derivates, though there are wrongly
formed loan translations. Other borrowings, especially from English, tend to be
replaced by indigenous expressions. Translated books tend to replace direct loans in
subsequent editions.
