Spanglish

Ever since the word “Espanglish” first appeared in print, on October 28, 1948, both the style of speaking that it refers to and, more recently, the label itself, have been mired in debates enmeshed in the language politics of the day, with critical implications for the reproduction or interruption of social inequality in Latina/o communities. Salvador Tió (1948), former president of the Puerto Rican Academy of the Spanish Language, published his definition fifty years after the U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico in 1898 imposed English as the language of instruction, amidst a debate about reinstating Spanish. Tió’s definition included notions that remain popular: that Spanglish is a new language consisting of parts of English and Spanish words, that it reflects confusion and ambivalence and represents a death knell for Spanish via English/U.S. imperialism: “This new language will be called ‘Espanglish.’… It is an ambivalent language. It is a real fusion. Bilingualism is a confusion. It is implanted with the goal of making us dominant in a language that hopes to dominate us” (Tió 1948; translation mine). These themes persist in definitions like Wikipedia’s—“Spanglish is informal due to the lack of structure and set rules”—and the Urban Dictionary’s—“Urban American language. Not quite English, Not quite Spanish.” In a New York Times op-ed, a Yale University professor said Spanglish is “an invasion of Spanish by English” that is spoken mainly by “poor Hispanics, many barely literate in either language,” and that it represents “a grave danger to Hispanic culture and to the advancement of Hispanics in mainstream America” (González Echevarría 1997). These comments reflect various aspects of “_chiquita_fication” (Zentella 1995)— that is, the trivialization of Latinas/os’ use of varieties of Spanish (as non-authentic and non-European), the disparagement of their knowledge of English (as non- standard), and the bashing of their bilingual skills, particularly Spanglish (by referring to them as a-linguals or semi-linguals). As Latinas/os became the largest minority, language discrimination intensified, along with anti-Latina/o violence (Zentella 2014).