Spanglish (1)

Controversy reigns (reina) and the subject is Spanglish. Critics say Spanglish is neither good Spanish nor good English and that it is speaking two languages, but badly, at the same time. Other people say it is a natural phenomenon for people who live and think in both the English-speaking and the Spanish-speaking cultures.

Some people think it is very serious and maybe it is more serious than we realise. Academics and members of language associations criticise Spanglish because they say it has a destructive effect on the Spanish language. Some critics even say that using Spanglish is a conscious or unconscious acceptance of English as the superior language. They say that its users have no pride (orgullo) in the Spanish that is, in many cases, their native language. They complain that users of Spanglish don’t even make the effort (esfuerzo) to use perfectly correct Spanish expressions and that they use Spanglish because they prefer the English word (not because the appropriate word or expression does not exist in Spanish). The opposition also say that Spanglish originally came from dialects used by the under-educated (con pocos estudios ) and lower classes (in other words, people who might not know the words in Spanish.)

  

Maybe one of the issues that complicate the Spanglish question is Spanish speakers’ traditional dependency on pronouncing words as they are written (based on the Spanish phonetic system). Historically, the correct pronunciation of foreign words has never been encouraged, (promovidas) nor modelled by Spanish speakers. Even role models such as teachers, TV and radio announcers and political or religious leaders have notoriously mispronounced foreign words and names. For this reason, one of the ways foreign words have been successfully introduced and adopted without their pronunciation being totally distorted (distorsionados) has been by distorting their spelling. This has given us líder, instead of leader, mitin instead of meeting, quiosco for kiosk, champán for champagne, champú for shampoo, coñac for cognac, and suéter for sweater. A lot of Spanglish words are distorted Spanish spellings of English words.