Le spanglish

The Spanglish

With more than 45 millions of Hispanic, the United States are one of the most important places where concentrates the Hispanic population in the world.

Some USA’s hispanic are characterized by the fact that they are monolingual, a part speak Spanish and the other one speak English. But it turns out that the great majority are bilingual and that a language dominates the other one. This situation of contact between Spanish and English created influences in both directions and gives rise to an undeniable cultural fusion: the hispanisation of the United States and the strong "anglophonisation" of the Hispanic ones. One of the fundamental elements of the fusion was the mixture between both languages, Spanish and English, which results from a complex phenomenon, an hybrid language called "spanglish" was born.

What is exactly the spanglish? The linguists indicate that it is about a code - switching; that is, an alternation of both languages by speaking, with few rules and many variants of lexical and syntactic type. Incorporated into the means of communication (radio, television, press, …), just like in movies and in music, and converted in an authentic literary movement; the spanglish stopped being an only oral phenomenon.

It is the Puerto Rican writer Salvador Tió that seems to have forged in the 1940s the term of espanglish, later at the origin of the english term : spanglish appearing for the first time in an entitled column Teoría del, published in the newspaper El Diario of Porto Rico of October 28th, 1948. The column is resumed in its work A fuego lento, published by the university of Puerto Rico in 1954. In 1964, the writer and French linguist René Étiemble creates a new word in French: the Franglais in his book « Parlez-vous franglais ? ».

Most of the authors consider that it is in fact in the 1960s when occurred, in the Hispanic districts of Miami, New York and Los Angeles, the development of the spanglish, which then spread in the other urban areas.

The Hispanic populations of the United States and the British populations of Argentina speak varieties of spanglish. The spanglish doesn’t constitute an unified dialect, the name can change in differents areas; we find important variations between the spanglish spoken in New York, in Miami, in Texas or in California.

The spanglish is a totally informal language, which rules are not established in a strict way. Two phenomena intervene in the training of the spanglish: the loan (code-borrowing) and the inversion (code-switching). The words borrowed from English are generally adapted to the Spanish phonology.

Ilán Stavans, professor of cultures and Latin American languages at the University of Boston, studied this linguistic phenomenon, which he compares with the Yiddish. He published in 2003 a work on this subject: The Making of a New American Language, where he translates even in this language the first chapter of the Don Quichotte (a novel very known in the Hispanic countries).

The spanglish allows a Spanish who knows little English and a Spanish-speaking English to communicate without major language problems. It is used however especially by inhabitants of the United States or Spanish - American.

The spanglish is a phenomenon that was born in the United States in Spanish-speaking communities in some states of the United States, such as Florida, Texas,  etc ..., this phenomenon has crossed the borders of the American continent and exported in Spain.

In South America, Spanish and Portuguese mix in portuñol, whereas in Peru, Japanese of the migrants of the second generation mixes in the local language to give the Japoñol. Also in France, with the Franglais, or in Spain in the Basque Country, the combination of Spanish and euskara gives the euskagnol.

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