Spanglish Origin and Continued Use

     Spanish and English have been used together in both conversation and literature since colonial times. The result of this language mingle is the creation of "Spanglish",  a curious dialect which consists of both Spanish and English used in the same sentence. While Spanglish does not combine Spanish and English words to form new ones, the dialect is primarily powered by the substitution of words. Rather than a dialect, therefore, it is also recognizable as an interlanguage.

     Words are interchangeable in Spanglish. The substitution plays a role when a Spanish speaker prefers to use a word in Spanish rather than its English counterpart, or vice versa. Florida and Texas were once Spanish-speaking colonies (owned by Spain and Mexico respectively) before they were acquired by the United States, an English-speaking country. Once English was introduced to these territories, the duel language was born from the migration of Spanish speakers into the growing United States. 

     Whether or not a person uses Spanish words more than English ones depends on how comfortable they are speaking both languages. However, Spanglish usually involves taking a base, familiar language and inserting a foreign word into a sentence spoken in the more familiar language. This process is known as code-switching. 

     Writer Junot Díaz, a Dominican-American writer for the New Yorker, has published short stories that demonstrate the continued use of Spanglish. One of his most notable short stories is called "This Is How You Lose Her", a breakdown of what happened to Díaz before and after he cheated on his girlfriend. He demonstrates his skill of blending English and Spanish grammar into sentences that craft a compelling story anyone can relate to. 

      "Her father, who used to treat me like his hijo, calls me an asshole on the phone,..." is a line in the story that shows how Spanish words can easily replace the most common ones in English. "Hijo" is given enough context clues for a reader to define it as a familial term: "son", in this case. One part of the text labels the protagonist a "sucio", which is slang on the word "dirty" but meant to indirectly translate as "a bit of dirt". This translation is a bit harder to decipher into English, but the word is given more meaning when the protagonist calls himself an "asshole" in order to provide context that "sucio" is being used an insult. 

Photo from Sideplayer

     The above conversation is an observation of how word choice effects the sentence. Díaz uses less Spanish while communicating his story, while Anita and Mark demonstrate more comfortability in describing a parking scenario in Spanish. This links back to the idea of who prefers to write in one language more than the other.

     While some Spanish speakers mix the two languages for the sake of communication, they also do so out of preserving identity. Mexican individuals who wanted to ensure the survival of their language discovered a way to live in the United States through a loophole in the Immigration Reform and Control Act. The result was a halfway assimilation into US society via a new dialect that was a mix of their language and the one requested of them to be learned by the US government.