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Spanglish
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Spanglish — espanglish, espaninglish, el Spanish broken, ingléspañol, ingleñol, espan'glés, espanolo,|blends]] of the language names "English" and "Spanish") or jerga fronteriza — refers to the range of language-contact phenomena, primarily in the speech of the Hispanic and Anglo population of the United States and the population of Mexico living near the Mexican-American border, who are exposed to both Spanish and English.
These phenomena are produced by close border contact and large bilingual communities along the United States-Mexico border and California, Oregon, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, Puerto Rico, The City of New York, and Chicago. It is common in Panama, where the 96-year (1903-1999) U.S. control of the Panama Canal influenced much of local society, especially among the former residents of the Panama Canal Zone, the Zonians.
Spanglish also is known by a regional name, e.g. "Tex-Mex" in Texas, (cf. "Tex-Mex cuisine").
In Mexico, the term pochismo applies to Spanglish words and expressions. Spanglish is not a pidgin language. In the late 1940s, the Puerto Rican linguist Salvador Tió coined the terms Spanglish and inglañol, a converse phenomenon wherein Spanish admixes with English; the latter term is not as popular as the former.
In the vernacular, Spanglish is a jocular mix-up of Spanish and English wherein the speaker renders an English word to sound Spanish in a jokingly demeaning way: "Oh, here comes El Tubbo" (a fat man, known to the speaker, who would be unoffended), expressing action or excitement: "I want some snackolas!!", "Let's party-ola!", or "Here's the pizza-mundo", and innocuous such as "Take los kitties to the vet, okay?" The examples tend to not gender match in Spanish, but is considered neither error or offense, e.g. "No problem-o" (should be "problema"). Another use is in a pun or joke: "I speak Spanglish." which is followed by either "sí?" or "see?", both pronounced alike.
There is another dialect, known as Llanito, that arose in British-controlled Gibraltar and is not a part of the "Spanglish" phenomenon.
Linguistic critique of the term "Spanglish" Spanglish is a popular, but not technical, term for these linguistic phenomena. Linguists refer to them with several terms: code mixing, code switching, loanword, language contact, and generally, bilingualism. Linguists do not consider Spanglish a term useful in discussing these phenomena, because it groups linguistic phenonema that do not necessarily belong together; many things labelled Spanglish are very different from each other. The novel Yo-Yo Boing!, by Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi, is an example of a fully bilingual literary exercise incorporating code-switching, bilingualism, and Spanish.
For example, the speech of a fully bilingual Spanish and English speaker in the U.S. who spontaneously switches between Spanish and English usages in mid-sentence, linguistically is someone very different from a monolingual Puerto Rican Spanish speaker whose native vocabulary contains many English words and expressions.
See also
External links- Ilán Stavans (Spanglish translation)
- "Nuyorican Power," Current TV program on Nuyorican culture, featuring Giannina Braschi, Produced By: Evan B. Stone & Carrie Pyle.
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