Spanish Influencing English

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Javier from Dallas.

Hi, Javier. How are you doing?

Good, good. I have a question, and it sort of involves my background and my native tongue, which is Spanish.

I was born in Brownsville, Texas, which is right on the border with Mexico.

Right.

And both of my parents are, they’re Mexican, so they both speak Spanish as their first language.

And when they moved to the United States, they didn’t learn English until they were about, I’d say, 30 or 40.

So they speak it with a heavy accent. In any case, it was natural for me to learn Spanish first, and I didn’t learn English until I was about five or six when I went to pre-K.

So it wasn’t until I moved to Dallas that I realized people seem to think I say some strange things, and it’s not really how I say it.

It’s more along the lines of the phrases I use. And so I’ll give you some examples.

My current girlfriend, I took her out on a date, and this was maybe our third date.

And when I picked her up, I said, oh, I forgot my wallet.

So why don’t we go back to my place?

We’ll get my wallet and we’ll go eat.

She said, okay, that’s fine.

So we drive back to my place.

And when I get there, I pull up and I stop the car and I say, hey, do you want to get down?

And she looks at me.

She’s very confused.

And I say it again.

I’m like, do you want to get down?

And she later told me she thought I was coming on to her.

It’s the third date.

Yeah, it wasn’t until I told her, do you want to go inside?

She said, oh, do you mean do I want to get out of the car?

I said, yeah, that’s what I said.

And she said, no, that’s not at all what you said.

So that comes from the Spanish translation or the Spanish phrase, De quieres bajar, which literally translates to, do you want to get down?

When I say that to native English speakers, they have no idea what I’m saying.

Another example, if I see a movie, let’s say, you know, Tom Cruise, it’s a Tom Cruise movie.

So I’ll tell my friends, yeah, I saw Mission Impossible.

You know, Tom Cruise came out in that.

And they’ll say, Tom Cruise finally came out?

No, no, no, no. He was in that movie.

And so again, it’s another translation from Spanish.

Direct translation means something completely different.

So I guess my question is, considering that there’s so many large influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants, is the English language, is it changing because of that?

Is it being influenced because of that?

And also, is this being seen in any other cultures, or has it been seen historically where, you know, one large group of people has changed a language because of that?

Mm-I wouldn’t say that it’s influencing native English speakers so much.

I suspect that there’s more influence going the other way around.

Okay. So you think the English language is influencing Spanish or?

Yeah, I would say so. Wouldn’t you, Grant?

Yeah, there’s a couple things happening here.

Have you ever done any reading about the different varieties of Spanglish that exist in the United States?

Oh, sure. Yeah, I’m very familiar with Spanglish.

There’s one interesting thing that I think is relevant here, which is the varieties of Spanglish that are spoken, say, in Southern California or Northern California, in Texas and Florida and New York.

And these are the big places where you can really identify a body of people who speak a kind of, to one degree or another, a mix of English and Spanish.

They’re different. They mix in different ways.

And so what you’ve got are some individual dialects.

And there’s a whole spectrum of almost completely Spanish and almost completely English, and then all the gradations between.

What you’re talking about here is an almost completely English version of language that has just the barest hint of the Spanish influence.

And it is easy for those calcs.

I think Martha used that word.

No, I didn’t.

Oh, it’s easy for those patterns.

A calc is a pattern that’s taken from one language and adopted into another language.

So you put the words from the second language on top of the grammar of the first language.

It’s easy for those calcs to be passed from person to person, and so they become normal.

If you look, for example, at the English spoken in Singapore, it’s very far from what could be called standard English pretty much anywhere else in the world.

And yet they all understand each other, and they all speak English in a way that’s considered nonstandard by Americans or Brits or even Australians.

And they’ve done it because they all are speaking this kind of calcified or calcified language that they all taught each other.

So that’s a little bit of what’s happening there.

And Javier, I think your question was also, are people who speak Spanish as a first language influencing native English speakers, people who grew up speaking English? Is that what you’re asking?

Not necessarily influencing the people, but considering the fact that Hispanic people are going to be the largest minority, I think, in the next decade or so, it’s obvious if it’s going to be whatever it is, 30%, and that continues to grow.

I’m just curious, what are people 50 years from now going to think of the way we speak now?

Is the language, obviously languages change, but is it going to change because of a direct influence from this population?

It will, and we’re already seeing it.

You can find studies done back as far as the 40s and 50s when big migrations came from Puerto Rico and Cuba in the 60s, of course, into the United States.

And ever since then, people have been tracking this.

And what you find, mostly what is borrowed into English from Spanish is the vocabulary.

Obvious stuff such as cultural words, food, music, and so forth.

And occasionally find names for things that didn’t exist in the English-speaking world until Spanish speakers brought them, so types of tools or types of instruments, for example, for making music, that sort of thing.

But it’s the lexus, as they say, that changes the most and changes in the most obvious ways and not necessarily the grammar.

Does that make sense?

Absolutely.

Okay, cool.

Thanks, guys. Thanks for answering my question.

Okay, let’s check in in 50 years, okay?

All right, we’ll do.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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