Abstract
There are many different varieties of both standard and non-standard Spanish spoken in the United States, and virtually all have been strongly influenced by their extensive contact with English. One of the results of this language contact has been the emergence of a number of different contact language varieties, commonly grouped together and called ‘Spanglish’. Spanglish is neither Spanish nor English; it is a distinctive language variety (or, more accurately, collection of language varieties) used by different populations in the US. In this chapter, some of the common phonological, lexical and syntactic characteristics identified with Spanglish are discussed, as are the implications of Spanglish for both identity and education.
Attributed to Cristina Saralegui, the Cuban-born journalist and host of the television talk show El Show de Cristina on Univisión.
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- 1.
Tió actually created two words to describe this phenomenon; the other, less known term, was ‘Inglañol’. In contemporary Spanish, Spanglish is called ‘el espanglés’—a term that generally speaking has the same negative connotations as its English equivalent.
- 2.
Both of these terms are problematic from a linguistic perspective. As Susan Romaine has noted, “[In discussions of semilingualism] we see a number of basic misconceptions about the nature of language and about what constitutes competence in a language, as they have been applied specifically to bilinguals” (2000, p. 234). Human beings are typically not ‘alingual’ or ‘semilingual’ in any meaningful sense, with few possible exceptions, one such exception that should be noted is the case of hearing-impaired children whose acquisition of language is delayed by the absence of exposure to a sign language or other linguistic input.
- 3.
Although our focus here is on the different varieties of Spanish on the development on varieties of Spanglish, the varieties of English that are spoken around speakers of Spanish would also have an impact on their particular variety of Spanglish.
- 4.
The use of Spanglish is also not the same as the use of what Ofelia García and others have called ‘translanguaging’, which refers to the dynamic process by which bilingual and multilingual speakers use their multiple languages as an integrated communication system (see Canagarajah, 2011; García, 2009; García & Kleyn, 2016; García & Wei, 2014; MacSwan, 2017), though there is certainly overlap between translanguaging and Spanglish.
- 5.
The use of the * is a linguistic convention indicating that a particular form is ungrammatical (in a linguistic sense) in the language being discussed.
- 6.
I have used ‘Spanish’ to describe articles such as el, la, los, las, and so on, as well as in talking about nouns and verbs, but in fact given the argument presented here they might just as easily—and perhaps more accurately—be termed ‘Spanglish’ articles, nouns, and adjectives.
- 7.
There is not, of course, a single ‘standard Spanish’, any more than there is a ‘standard English’. In discussing the differences between Spanglish as it is spoken in the southwest and a more standardized variety of the language, I am using the generic label ‘standard Spanish’ to refer to the different national Spanishes spoken in Latin America (which are themselves incredibly diverse). This is an important note, because there are elements of Spanglish that may also be found in some regional varieties of Mexican Spanish, but which would not be accepted as standard either in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America.
- 8.
There are also, of course, a large number of English borrowings into standard Spanish (e.g., el software), as well as borrowings from Spanish into standard English. The borrowings discussed here, however, are those which would most likely not be accepted in any variety of standard Spanish, but which are found in Spanglish.
- 9.
Although listed here as an example of Spanglish, the word líder is now accepted in most varieties of standard Spanish.
- 10.
- 11.
This is true for terms like la systma, la síntoma, la diploma, and la mediodía, but not for words of high frequency such as el día, which retains its standard Spanish gender (see Sánchez, 2008, p. 27).
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Reagan, T. (2019). Spanglish in the United States: ‘We speak Spanglish to the dogs, to the grandchildren, to the kids’. In: Linguistic Legitimacy and Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10967-7_4
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