Is Spanglish a "real" language?

While many scholars celebrate Spanglish as an inevitable result of the mixing of two civilizations, it is not without its critics. Both Spanish and English speakers have scorned the language, claiming it is a form of “broken” English or Spanish or a corruption of both languages. According to the renowned Octavio Paz, “No es ni bueno no malo, sino abominable.” (It is neither good nor bad, but abominable). Jimena Berceño, the arts coordinator of the Latin American Youth Center in Washington, D.C., claims that “using Spanglish dilutes not only two languages, but two distinct and vast civilizations” (Gordon).  Berceño, along with many other Spanish-language purists, cites the shock she presumes Cervantes might feel were he alive to witness the growth of Spanglish.

            However, not all students of Cervantes would agree. A representative of the Real Academia Española de la Lengua Castellana snidely remarked to Ilan Stavans that Spanish could never be a “real” language without a translation of Don Quijote. In response, Stavans did exactly that (I’ll discuss his work further in a future post on written Spanglish). In an essay titled Don Quixote in Spanglish: tradductor, traditore?, Lourdes Torres contests the notion of an appalled Cervantes. According to Torres, Cervantes would have embraced the Spanglish translation, because, “after all, Don Quixote is, above all, a novel about the encounter of cultures, classes, and ways of speaking” (331).

            Despite the thousands of translations of the novel across the world, having Don Quixote does not make a language “real.” Linguist Max Weinreich notes, “The difference between a language and a dialect is that the language has an army and navy behind it” (Stavans). While some might argue that Spanglish has a number of armies and navies behind it, it is important to remember that even the United States has no “official” language yet few dispute the status of American English. Additionally, dialectologists often cite the “mutual intelligibility” of the dialects of a language as a marker of distinction between dialects and full-blown “languages.” However, according to numerous Spanglish scholars, Spanglish is not mutually intelligible for either speakers of English or Spanish. In fact, the only individuals who can understand Spanglish are bilingual speakers of Spanish and English. This claim implicitly asserts that no one speaks Spanglish as his or her native language, but as Spanglish grows in the U.S. this is likely to change. In fact, children born of Spanglish-speaking parents may already contradict this assertion.   

            According to Lourdes Torres, Spanglish employs three major linguistic strategies that affirm its status as a language, not a “broken” or incorrect form of Spanish or English. These strategies are borrowing, code switching, and calquing (330). Each process occurs not randomly but with constraints regulating their usage and defining the parameters the language. In the next few posts I’ll discuss some of these strategies and the grammatical principles of Spanglish.

Gordon, Malaika. Fresh Air. NPR. Washington, D.C. 12 May 2008.

 Stavans, Ilan. "Spanglish: Speaking la Lengua Loca." EJournal USA (2008). America.gov. 11 Apr.2008. .21 Apr. 2009  

 Torres, Lourdes. “Don Quixote in Spanglish: Traducttore, traditore?”. Romance Quarterly 52.4 (2005 Fall), pp. 328 334