Is Spanglish a Language?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant.

Hi, how are you doing?

Hi, who’s this?

This is Jessica. I’m calling from Bloomington, Indiana.

Jessica, welcome.

How are you doing?

I’m great. How are you guys?

Okay, great. Super wonderful. What’s going on in Bloomington?

Well, actually, I have been a little confused by the way that the word Spanglish has been thrown around.

I’ve been seeing it in the media and in the press about that they’ve referred to it as a language.

But I’m not convinced that that’s so.

And I brought that up to one of my professors, and he kind of cringed at that notion.

But he didn’t really give me an explanation either.

So I guess I’m just searching for how can we define Spanglish?

Spanglish.

So you’re talking about this amalgam of English and Spanish that’s spoken in some parts of the United States.

Correct.

Okay.

So you do have Spanglish speakers in Bloomington?

Yeah.

Yeah, most of them are graduate students.

Oh, okay.

But, yeah.

Well, I would side with your professor for sure.

Spanglish is not a language on its own.

And this is an academic definition, though.

As far as the press is concerned, they’re free to define the term any way they want.

Spanglish is used kind of, how should we say this?

You might put it in the title of your paper, and you might include it in the paper,

But you’re never going to give it the full treatment alongside English and French and Russian and so forth, right?

Okay.

So it’s not going to be promoted into this class of languages where it’s got the full grammar and the full treatment and the full dictionaries.

It is something akin, I would say, to a pidgin, though not exactly formal like that.

Usually it means that English words are borrowed into the language of Spanish speakers because they need them.

They need them for their jobs.

They need them for school or for daily life.

There are, for example, if you go to Amazon, Amazon.com, you will find tons of books that have Spanglish for construction workers.

So these weird kind of like transformations of the word building or two by four, the names of the tools or the processes and that sort of thing.

And so it’s a modification of English so that it fits into Spanish grammar, syntax, morphological rules.

That is how they form words, how words are conjugated.

It’s really interesting stuff.

So more like a code-switching phenomenon?

Yeah, it’s a little bit of that, but it’s so different from place to place.

I lived in New York City for a long time,

And the Spanglish spoken there is very Puerto Rican-influenced

With an undertone of Dominican Spanish and a little bit of Mexican Spanish thrown in,

Whereas in California it is almost exclusively northern Mexican Spanish,

At least in San Diego County where I live now.

And even more so, it’s the Spanish spoken in the northern states of Mexico.

You will get some Guatemalans and that sort of thing here.

But for the most part, it’s…

So they’re very different in the words that they adopt as well

Because of the different environments

And the different kind of work that are available.

So it can’t be codified.

You know, there’s that famous saying,

Weinreich, who was a Yiddish scholar,

Had this saying when people would ask him if Yiddish was a language.

He says, well, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

Right.

And so Spanglish hasn’t been…

It’s not spoken by a state.

There’s not like a government that has it as its official language.

Okay.

So, yeah, not a language, but definitely a phenomenon, definitely a thing,

And definitely it does have some consistency, but it’s not a language.

Okay.

Jessica, did you read Elon Stavon’s book on Spanglish?

I didn’t.

Yeah, you might enjoy that because he really celebrates it.

He’s a professor who was born in Mexico and is a professor here.

I think he’s still at Amherst.

Is that where he is?

He might be.

He’s written a couple books on Spanglish.

Yeah, yeah.

And he actually translated the first chapter of Don Quixote into Spanish.

Oh, wow.

He loved it.

And if you know even just the basic amount of Spanish, it’s surprisingly readable.

Yeah.

Because the English is there and the Spanish is there and then the rules start to make sense.

It’s kind of like the first time you read the book Trainspotting, where you didn’t get the Scots English exactly, but by the end of the book you were all set.

Okay, great.

Cool.

Thank you guys so much.

I really appreciate it.

Okay, great talking with you.

You too.

Have a good day.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Call us 877-929-9673.