Spanglish

From Geography

Spanglish is a language which is spoken inbetween the borders of the USA and Mexico. It can be seen as a political assertion of a border identity (Price, 2010). There are many different definitions given for this concept, because it's kind of an abstraction whose varied definitions are politically and ideologically motivated. There is a defenition made by Johnson (2000), which states that it is the particular combination of Spanisch and English language contact, with Spanish being the dominant of the pair. This is confirmed by Pountain (1999) who states that Spanglish is characterised by a version of Spanish that is lexicalised by English. It's something very hard to define, but very easy to recognize. It expresses a unity in what the community is doing rather than were they came from.

Borderland/La Frontera

Gloria Anzaldua (1987) describes the concept of borderlands in her book Borderlands/La Frontera. In this borderland there is a mixing of the languages Spanish and English. By switching from Spanish to English, Anzaldua gives the impression that she is tied to both cultures. Zentella (1997) takes the idea of borderlands further by describing US Latinos as stuck between the prestigious English monolingual world and the stigmatized Spanish monolingual world located within the USA. The creation of a hybrid language then can be seen as a way of stating that they belong to both worlds and that neither should have to be given up. Further demonstrates the transnational sympathy of a postmodern border crossing, as older patterns of inclusion and exclusion are replaced with new hybrid forms (Morales, 2002).

References

• Anzaldua, G. (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, California: Spinsters/Aunt Lute Books.
• Johnson, F.L. (2000) Speaking culturally: language diversity in the United States. London: Sage
• Morales, E. (2002) Living in Spanglish: The search for Latino identity in America. New York: St. Martin’s Press
• Pountain, C.J. (1999) Spanish and English in the 21st Century. Donaire,12 (April), 33-42
• Price, T. (2010) What is Spanglish? The phenomenon of code-switching and its impact amongst US Latinos, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
• Zentella, A.C. (1997) Growing Up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Oxford: Blackwell

Contributors

• Page created by Marleen Revenberg, 24 October 2012