Word: spanglish
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...