Five Things I Wish People Knew About Spanglish
Not all Spanish-English bilinguals speak Spanglish. But for some of us, it's the language we use to navigate the world.
#1 Spanglish is not an interlanguage
You know when you’re learning a new language and you’re able to have a basic conversation but you low-key know you’re making a ton of mistakes and are sometimes just making up words? Like if you’re just starting to learn Spanish and you call a table a tabla because you haven’t learned the word mesa yet. Well, that’s you speaking an interlanguage: an in-between learner version of the target language.
That’s not what I’m referring to when I talk about Spanglish—Spanglish isn’t the result of students learning English or Spanish and mixing the two languages out of necessity. Instead, when I refer to Spanglish, I’m referring to either speakers who grew up bilingually and biculturally or speakers who have been living in a community of Spanglish speakers for years.
While interlanguage and Spanglish can sometimes look the same, here’s the difference:
When I was staying with a host family in France a couple of years ago, I was a complete beginner. My host family was really nice and we’d have dinners that lasted for hours every night. Needless to say, I had to find ways to communicate while knowing little-to-no French. So, I’d use the languages I did know to think if there’d be any cognates. My inner monologue would be like “okay, how do I say napkin? Le napkin sounds a little made up but the Spanish word servilleta with a French accent—servillette—sounds pretty right.” So I’d say servillette and then see if they’d understand me. As you can guess, a lot of the time I was wrong, and I’d end up just saying gibberish with a French accent.
That led to times when —out of desperation—I’d mix in other languages to get my point across. I’d say something like, “Je went a l’ecole ajourd’hui et it was bon.”
Somehow we communicated and spent hours every evening with my half made-up French. The key part of this story is that I mixed the languages because I didn’t have a choice—I was desperate.
When I speak Spanglish, though, it has nothing to do with my proficiency level in Spanish or English; it’s just a way I like to communicate with my friends and family. It flows out of my mouth as fluently as my English (if not more fluently than my English). And I speak it for the same reason as I speak English or Spanish: to communicate my message.
It’s never out of necessity or desperation. Quite the opposite, it’s what naturally comes out of my mouth.
#2 Many structural linguists consider Spanglish as much of a language as Spanish or English
Linguistics is a descriptive field meaning linguists observe how people communicate. It’s not up to a linguist to say whether one language is better or worse than another; in linguistics, all languages are equal.
That being said, linguists do use certain criteria to label something a language. From a structural linguistics perspective, a language is a rule-governed system used to communicate a message. And Spanglish meets that criteria.
Like I said in the last section, I use Spanglish to effectively communicate my ideas every day. Millions of other Spanglish speakers do too. The second criteria, though, is a little more complicated. It entails looking at Spanglish conversations and seeing if there are consistent syntactic rules. It turns out there are!
For example, one of the most fascinating rules about Spanglish syntax is that Spanglish speakers only switch languages at moments at which they wouldn’t be violating the syntax of either Spanish or English.
In other words, if we somehow looked in the subconscious mind of a Spanglish speaker while they are speaking, we would see that they’re thinking of both the English and Spanish syntax rules and they’re only switching languages at moments where English and Spanish syntax are the same.
Un ejemplo:
Spanglish speakers wouldn’t switch between an adjective and a noun, since Spanish and English syntax differ: in Spanish the adjective is after the noun, in English it is before the noun:
A red car.
Determiner - adjective - noun
Un carro rojo.
Determiner - noun - adjective
It’s unlikely that a Spanglish speaker would say ‘a red carro’ or ‘un carro red.’
Spanglish has a grammar. And just like you likely have an intuition about what’s grammatical or ungrammatical in your dominant language, Spanglish speakers can tell when something is ungrammatical in their language.
As a Spanglish speaker, I sometimes see people mixing Spanish and English in ways that are ungrammatical. For example, I saw a book called Truquitos para speak English (translation: tricks for speaking English). While the title does mix the two languages, my mind automatically knew that it’s ungrammatical in Spanglish: truquitos para speakING English or truquitos for speaking English sound better to me.
As a linguist describing what’s going on in mind I can say that my mind knows that English syntax requires a gerund after ‘for.’ And that my mind prefers switching at the phrase boundary because English and Spanish syntax differ. In English, you need a gerund. In Spanish, you need an infinitive. So, saying truquitos for speaking English is the version that I prefer.
English: Tricks for learning (gerund)
Spanish: Truquitos para aprender (infinitive)
I have no idea whether the author was even trying to use Spanglish but the example shows that Spanglish is not the result of speakers not knowing Spanish or English syntax. Rather, it shows that Spanglish is the result of speakers knowing a great deal of both English and Spanish syntax.
#3 Spanglish is not new
Language mixing is the result of two linguistic groups meeting and needing to communicate. In the case of Spanglish, English and Spanish met in the 1820s in the Mexican state of Tejas y Coahuila.
The inhabitants and the borders of this state changed drastically over the next two decades. The super abridged version is that in 1823 Stephen Austin bought a land grant and brought 300 English-speaking families to the Mexican state of Tejas y Coahuila, mainly to Tejas. A couple years later the Mexican government began restricting immigration from the U.S, as too many Americans were going to Mexico for cheap land during the first depression. After several wars, Tejas won independence in 1836 (Coahuila remained part of Mexico). And a decade later, Texas became part of the U.S.
The inhabitants of Texas at that point were a mix of English and Spanish speakers. And concurrent to the political changes, the speakers during those decades learned to communicate with one another: for some words they’d use the English version, for others, the Spanish version; they did what they needed to do to communicate.
And as a result, Spanglish was born.
#4 Spanglish has dialects like any other language
Miami has been described as the most dialectally diverse Spanish-speaking city in the world. It’s because we have speakers from every single country in Latin America living here. More than anywhere, though, due to our geography, we mainly have speakers from the Caribbean: from coastal Colombia to Cuba to the Dominican Republic.
Other cities in the U.S. with a high density of Spanish-speakers have groups from other countries. Texas and Southern California have large Mexican populations, for example.
And since Spanglish is the result of language contact, when different dialects of the language mix, they produce different results. When I first heard Spanglish from New York, I was surprised by how different it sounded from the Spanglish I grew up with in Miami.
Here’s the closest example of Miami Spanglish that I could find online. Even though Jenny—a Miami-raised Cuban American—is exaggerating for comedic effect at times in this video, she switches into Spanish at the same moments when I would, mainly to describe family memories; cultural elements that we’re exposed to in Spanish, like watching telenovelas with our abuelitas; or random words that are just better in Spanish (aka they don’t translate well), like tremendo:
The linguistic research which does exist on Spanglish mainly focuses on dialects outside of Miami. And while I was reading the research for the first time in graduate school, one of the first thoughts that came to my mind was, “this Spanglish is really different than what we speak in Miami.” One feature that was different was the loanwords that Spanglish speakers use in New York or North Carolina, for example saying lonchear for ‘to have lunch’ or carpeta for carpet. In Miami, I personally haven’t heard those words being used. A reason why we might have fewer of those words is because Spanish is younger in Miami: most of my friends or their parents grew up as Spanish monolinguals, whereas in other parts of the country, it might be that their grandparents or great-grandparents grew up as Spanish monolinguals.
One Spanglish isn’t better than any other; they’re just different, as they’ve come about due to different circumstances.
#5 All languages are the byproduct of language mixing
The last one is quick and important: all languages are influenced by language contact. If you look at the vocabulary of English, 58% comes from just French and Latin. In other words, English has (much) more French and Latin vocabulary than Old English vocabulary. And those words entered English at different points of the history. Some entered when the Romans were in England in AD 43. Others came from the time of the Norman Conquest.
The point is that people move and languages move with them. And as a result, one or both languages change. Same for English. Same for Spanglish.
Works Cited
Andresen, J. T., & Carter, P. M. (2016). Languages in the world: How history, culture, and politics shape language. John Wiley & Sons.
Mernaugh, L. (2017). Defining Spanglish: A Linguistic Categorization of Spanish-English Code-Switching in the United States.
I really enjoyed this Monica. I grew up bilingual in Scotland speaking Spanish and English, and my son is now doing the same (his dad is Spanish so it's the language we speak at home). We have a very different experience obviously as Edinburgh is not Miami, although there is a larger Spanish community than when I was growing up. But since reading your article I've been thinking about which words we swap in, and when we switch languages.
In Scotland we have an added layer of language within our society which is Scots. There are still people who claim that Scots is a dialect not a language. A lot of people use Scots words with English to varying degrees in Scotland, and it has a huge socio-economic judgment attached to it. Scots is traditionally associated with poor and working class communities (although historically there are plenty of examples of aristocracy and great thinkers using it too). Anyway, as always such a thought provoking piece which leaves me mulling things over for days - thank you!