The mix of Spanish and English is the world’s fastest growing linguistic hybrid. Experts calculate that it is spoken by 50 million people
In a single sentence, Rolando Hernández moves smoothly between English and Spanish. His narration is uninterrupted through shifts from one tongue to the other. He’s not doing it to translate what he’s saying; he simply takes for granted that the person listening to him will understand. The 26-year-old Cuban American is trilingual: he doesn’t just speak English and Spanish, but also Spanglish, a hybrid speech variety that was born out of the mix of Anglo and Hispanic cultures. In his Miami neighborhood of Hialeah, where three-quarters of residents are of Cuban descent and 95% of the population is Hispanic, Spanglish (in Spanish, espanglish) rules: “It’s everywhere, from the closest McDonald’s drive-through to the galleries in Wynwood,” says Hernández.
Though it is hard to know the exact number of people who speak Spanglish, it’s estimated that there are 35 to 40 million people in the United States who, like Hernández, communicate with it, more than half of the 62 million Latinos who live in the country. It’s a number that will only grow as the Latino community expands over the coming years: by 2060, it is predicted that one in every four U.S. residents will have Latino heritage. “It is the fastest-growing hybrid language in the world,” says Ilan Stavans, professor of Latinx and Latin American studies at Massachusetts’s Amherst College.
America intentionally has no official language.
Before WW2 large parts of the country only spoke German, and there were pockets all over that only knew the language of where they immigrated from.
It wasn’t until the World Wars and the advent of radio that everyone started moving to just English.
Hell, the town next to where I grew up still has German street signs and most businesses have their signs in German.
I think a decade or two ago they added English signs as well, but there wasn’t any law that forced them too.
People being mad about this stuff, is just boomers who think history started when they were born and nothing should fundamentally change as long as their alive.
Doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, they want everything to be exactly like how when they were kids. And by the time they were kids, was the big push for an English only America.
Languages shift and change over time. English, as we currently know it, has undergone several such shifts, to the point that it’s less a language and more several languages dressed up in a trench coat pretending to be one. Adding more Spanish words to the language is really just a continuation of a centuries old trend.
We had a big injection of Latin, and then French. Why not another Romance language?
Esperen, es todo español?
Siempre lo fue, cabron
Only 26% of English is made up of words of Germanic origin anyway (although they do tend to be the ones used most in everyday speech).
English is three languages in a trench coat.
Spanglish is four languages in a trench coat.
[relevant]
Johnny Depp going undercover as a Mexican on 21 Jump Street. Madre de dios!
