A Hybrid Tongue or Slanguage?
On a muggy Sunday afternoon at the Duenas home in South Gate, mariachi music bumped from a boombox on the concrete in the driveway. The roasted smells of carne asada lingered over a folding picnic table, like the easy banter between cousins.
"Le robaron la troca con everything. Los tires, los rines," a visiting cousin said.
Translation: "They robbed the truck with everything. The tires, the rims."
"theseQuieres watermelon?" offered Francisco Duenas, a 26-year-old housing counselor, holding a jug filled with sweet water and watermelon bits.
"Tal vez tiene some of the little tierrita at the bottom."
Translation: "Want watermelon? It might have some of the little dirt at the bottom."
When the Duenas family gathers for weekend barbecues, there are no pauses between jokes and gossip, spoken in English and Spanish. They've been mixing the languages effortlessly, sometimes clumsily, for years, so much so that the back-and-forth is not even noticed.
Spanglish, the fluid vernacular that crosses between English and Spanish, has been a staple in Latino life in California since English-speaking settlers arrived in the 19th century. And for much of that time, it has been dismissed and derided by language purists -- "neither good, nor bad, but abominable," as Mexican writer Octavio Paz famously put it.
But the criticism has done little to reduce the prevalence of Spanglish, which today is a bigger part of bilingual life than ever before.
Now it's rapidly moving from Latino neighborhoods into the mainstream. Spanglish is showing up in television and films, with writers using it to bring authenticity to their scripts and to get racy language past network executives. Marketers use it to sell everything from bank accounts to soft drinks. Hallmark now sells Spanglish greeting cards. And McDonald's is rolling out Spanglish TV spots that will air on both Spanish- and English-language networks.
In academia, once a bastion of anti-Spanglish sentiment, the vernacular is now studied in courses with names like "Spanish Phonetics" and "Crossing Borders." Amherst College professor Ilan Stavans published a Spanglish dictionary with hundreds of entries -- from gaseteria (which means "gas station") to chaqueta (for "jacket," instead of the Spanish word "saco"). Stavans said new Spanglish words are being created all the time, altering traditional notions of language purity that remained strong just a generation ago.
- The Rising Language of Latino Media: English May 04, 1997
- Latinos' Money Talks; Question Is, in Which Language? Nov 03, 1999
- Students Seek Training for Spanish-Language Media Nov 12, 2003
