Word: spanglish
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Foreign languages do not simply acquire American terms, of course, but adapt and rework them in a sort of hybridization variously known as Franglais, Spanglish or Japlish. The Germans, who have traditionally enjoyed concocting exotic combinations like Satisfaktionsfahigkei t (the state of being socially eligible to fight a duel), now add English to German as though creating a polyglot strudel. Powerstimmung, for example, means a great mood, which can make a German ganz high or even ausgeflippt...
This linguistic paella, a free-form blend of Spanish and English, is popularly known as Spanglish. It is becoming an increasingly common conversational mode in areas with heavy concentrations of Hispanic immigrants, especially California, the Gulf Coast and New York City. The informal acceptance of this hybrid reflects the fact that in those areas Spanish has become more than a foreign language though still less than a second language...
...Some Spanglish sentences are essentially English with a couple of Spanish words thrown in ("Do you have cold cerveza?"). Others are basically Spanish in structure with Hispanicized words borrowed from English ("Donde esta el vacuum cleaner?"). The confluence of the two languages is also producing new verb forms that are not found in any textbook. "Quieres monkear?" is one way of saying "Want to hang out?" Borrowed from the slang infinitive "to monkey around," the Spanglish verb monkear is used in the same way as truckear, which refers to working around trucks, shopear (i.e., at the market) and mopear...
Some English words are transferred without alteration into Spanglish because they are handier than their Spanish equivalents. Any Spanglish-speaking accountant knows, for instance, that it is easier to say "nineteen forty- five" than "mil novecientos cuarenta y cinco." Says Judith Schomber, an associate professor of Spanish at Georgia Southern College, who hears Spanglish in the conversations of her students: "They plug in the English words unconsciously. It is done so naturally as to be almost undetectable...
Comfortable as this slang may be, confusion sometimes results, especially since the borrowed English is generally pronounced as if it were Spanish. Spanglish-speaking chicanos, for instance, have taken to using embarrassar to mean "embarrass," which is what happens when that word is mistaken for embarazar, a Spanish word that sounds the same but means "to become pregnant." Moreover, many U.S. Hispanics have grown up hearing so much Spanglish that they are not sure which words are really English. Says Pedro Pedraza of the Puerto Rican studies department at Manhattan's Hunter College: "I've heard of Puerto Rican kids...