Kathena Siegel Homework #12 10/26/2011

Origins, Characteristics and Future Uses of Spanglish

Colonial times, some U.S territories like Florida were Spanish territories. 19th Century- After Mexican American War, millions of Spanish and American speakers stayed in contact. 19th and 20th Centuries- Latin Americans and Spaniards migrated to the U.S. Total Hispanic population of U.S today is 33 million people. Mexicans are mostly in southern states like CA and TX. Puerto Ricans mainly in NY. Half of the Hispanic population in South Florida is Cuban. Currently, the U.S is the 5th largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. Some Hispanics are balanced bilinguals while others can barely speak English. Hispanics are often able to understand English but have trouble speaking it. Spanglish is an interlanguage intrinsic to the Hispanic community that most English speakers barely realize exists. Frequent code-switching occurs with Spanglish. Spanglish is NOT a unified dialect and will most likely never become a language. Spanglish found in CA or TX is sometimes called Chicano. Spanglish has barely been approached from a linguistic point of view. Spanglish represents the most important contemporary linguistic phenomenon in the U.S. Hispanics only use English to talk with English speakers, not Spanglish. Spanglish is often associated with low-educated people and viewed a deformed Spanish. Spanglish has characteristics of Pidgin, Creole, and interlanguage. Whenever a word is more accessible in the other language, code switching is triggered.

History of Spanglish

Geographic regions

Characteristics of Spanglish

Three Sub-Types of Spanglish and Englaol

Code-switching and borrowing

Definitions and Grammar

Type 1: Use of English lexical items in original form in Spanish utterances. Type 2: English word spellings and/or pronunciations are changed and use non-Spanish identities. Type 3: English syntactic influences involving a merging of Spanish and English. Englaol does not use lexical borrowings. Englaol speakers are highly educated adult bilinguals, whereas Spanish speakers tend to be less-educated monolinguals. Borrowing occurs mostly with Nouns, especially when a word is used frequently in everyday life. Code-switching: at a certain point, the speaker changes the language and continues talking in another language. This switch is produced mostly when beginning a new sentence and usually a new topic. Code-mixture: within a single sentence, two languages are mixed and may alternate. Code-switching is the norm when speaking Spanish but not vice-versa. Anglization: the Spanish and English words are close in phonological composition, but the Spanish word is deformed to become closer to the English one. Liter translations: a word or sentence is translated, resulting in a grammatically acceptable utterance does not correspond to the one used in Spanish. Spanishation: using a Spanish word close to the English phonology but semantically distant. Spanglish has mixed grammar, partially maintaining the original Spanish grammar but also partially changed to become closer to English. Verb tenses are equated with English tenses. Spatial relations that do not exist in English tend to disappear when speaking Spanglish. Three demonstrative pronouns in Spanglish- este, ese, and aquel. Under the English influence, a Spanglish speaker may begin to tell the days of the week beginning with a Sunday. Numbers are said and read as a whole in Spanglish. In Spanish, phone numbers are clustered. Non-existent in English, the Spanish letter n may disappear and be omitted in writing and speaking. Pronouns are usually omitted.

Linguistic habits taken from English

The Future of Spanglish in the United States

Three scenarios can occur: It will disappear. It will continue growing and eventually receive the status of a language. It will continue growing as a non-recognized Spanish dialect. The current Latin American migratory flow to the U.S does not look like it is going to change much in the visible future. Spanish language, not Spanglish, with continue representing the standard for speaking. Most likely, Spanglish will continue growing as a nonrecognized Anglicized Spanish dialect.