Spanglish at the Border

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Kevin. I’m calling from San Diego, California.

Hi Kevin, welcome to the show. What’s up?

Here in the San Diego-Tijuana border region, I’ve noticed that there’s what you call Spanglish, right?

And I was wondering if anywhere else in the world with different languages did that phenomenon occur?

Do you speak Spanglish yourself?

I mean, yes and no, it’s like when you talk to somebody that’s also kind of a trans-border person, where they commute back and forth, it’s like it’ll slip up once in a while, or you switch either, like you use grammar in English, but speak Spanish words, or vice versa, or just, I mean, it can be a mix of anything.

Yeah, so your question is, does this occur anywhere else in the world?

Well, the first thing is it occurs all over the United States, this idea of Spanglish,

Which is usually a Spanish grammar structure with English words on top of it,

Still having a lot of Spanish words with some English ones thrown in,

Exist obviously in California, in Texas, in Florida, New York,

And other places where Spanish speakers live and work.

Puerto Rico, of course.

What’s interesting to me is that these Spanglishes tend to be a little different.

They adopt different words at different times and in different ways and for different reasons.

Although there are some consistencies like in the construction trades, for example,

And in kitchens, in the restaurant business,

Those tend to have some fairly standard borrowings from English into Spanish

That are widely used across the country.

But that is all to say is that it’s really not unusual in the rest of the world to have this happen.

In the rest of the world, there are the language proximity like in Europe and Africa and Asia,

People tend to speak a couple of languages at least, just as a matter of where that they live and work.

And it’s only in the United States where this seems really unusual, since so many of us are monolingual.

Okay, so like this happens with other languages all over the world?

Yeah, it does.

Although what’s interesting is they tend to learn the languages thoroughly.

So if you live, say, in Denmark, you probably speak Danish and English and probably some German as well.

And you don’t speak them piecemeal.

You learn them in school.

You learn them through travel.

You learn them from reading and watching media, that sort of thing.

So you have them thoroughly, and so you don’t necessarily have to mix them as much.

Kevin, I’m wondering when you’re explaining to people about Spanglish,

Are there specific examples, favorite examples that you use?

No, because for people like me that maybe were from Mexico

And then they ended up growing for most of the time in the U.S.

And went to school here, they’ll use things like use parking

And then instead of seeing the correct Spanish work, which is estacionadas.

So use parqueando.

-huh, parqueando.

Right.

And do you say things like likear instead of to like,

Like if you like something on Facebook in Spanish?

I don’t because since I travel to Mexico a lot,

I would get chained.

Oh, gotcha.

If I started speaking like that.

Right.

So you’ve got to control that.

If you go back to Mexico,

You can’t be throwing in all these half-Spanish words.

No, no.

And I go, I commute like at least once or twice a week,

So it keeps me on my toes.

By the way, there’s a really great book on Spanglish,

Which I recommend by Ilan Stavans.

It’s called Spanglish, The Making of a New American Language.

That’s Stavans, S-T-A-V-A-N-S.

Oh, okay.

Thank you so much.

I’ll look it up.

Yeah, sure.

All right.

Thanks, Kevin.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

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