Variedades del Spanglish

         Unsurprisingly, cities with massive populations of Spanglish speakers have developed their own dialects. Many Spanglish speakers in Texas, Gloria Anzaldúa included, consider themselves “TexMex” or “Tejano” speakers. A wave of Puerto Rican immigrants to New York has led to “Nuyorican” speech, while Cubans in Miami speak “Cubonics” (Torres 331). Chicano speech patterns connect Americans of Mexican heritage across the country.  Below are some links with examples of several varieties of Spanglish in the U.S.

 TexMex

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTFds-BQjUc

In this short documentary by Kimberly Dahl, Jennifer Lang and Shawn Warner on bilingualism in Bayside, Texas, community members discuss the use of Spanish, English and Spanglish in their community. There are several good examples of code-switching from 1:11-1:30, as well as a discussion on TexMex speech and its differences from “proper” Spanish, as noted by one resident (approximately 3:15). 

 

Nuyorican

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9ltOUYyMRE

Felipe Luciano, founder of the Young Lords Party (a political group for Puerto Rican-Americans in New York) speaks on the relevance of “old” Latino music such as Tito Puente. Even non-Spanish speakers can gauge, by the audience’s reaction, that Luciano code switches to emphasize a punch line. 

 

Cubonics

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/6580/cubonics.html

This website contains a number of Cubonics transliterations in which Spanish idiomatic phrases are translated literally into English, where the original meaning is not necessarily maintained.  I hesitate to say that the idiomatic meaning has been lost, however, as speakers of Cubonics are likely to understand what might seem odd to an English speaker. My favorite from the list is the Cubonics, “I care three cucumbers,” meaning “I don’t care,” translated from the Spanish “Me importa tres pepinos.”

Torres, Lourdes.  "Don Quixote in Spanglish: Traducttore, traditore?". Romance Quarterly: 52.4 ( 2005 Fall), pp. 328-34.