Word: spanglish
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This free-form blend of Spanish and English, known as Spanglish, is common linguistic currency wherever concentrations of Hispanic Americans are found in the U.S. In Los Angeles, where 55% of the city's 3 million inhabitants speak Spanish, Spanglish is as much a part of daily life as sunglasses. Unlike the broken-English efforts of earlier immigrants from Europe, Asia and other regions, Spanglish has become a widely accepted conversational mode used casually -- even playfully -- by Spanish-speaking immigrants and native-born Americans alike...
Consisting of one part Hispanicized English, one part Americanized Spanish and more than a little fractured syntax, Spanglish is a bit like a Robin Williams comedy routine: a crackling line of cross-cultural patter straight from the melting pot. Often it enters Anglo homes and families through the children, who pick it up at school or at play with their young Hispanic contemporaries. In other cases, it comes from watching TV; many an Anglo child watching Sesame Street has learned uno dos tres almost as quickly as one two three...
...Spanglish takes a variety of forms, from the Southern California Anglos who bid farewell with the utterly silly "hasta la bye-bye" to the Cuban-American drivers in Miami who parquean their carros. Some Spanglish sentences are mostly Spanish, with a quick detour for an English word or two. A Latino friend may cut short a conversation by glancing at his watch and excusing himself with the explanation that he must "ir al supermarket...
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...
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...