Spanglish - Term Paper Example

This aspect of Spanglish is also properly discussed in the paper. Spanglish and its History Spanglish is one of the most common languages among the Hispanic Americans. It is nothing but a mixture of English and Spanish. According to Oxford English Dictionary, Spanglish can be described as “a type of Spanish contaminated by English words and forms of expression, spoken in Latin America” (Lipski, John M. “Is “Spanglish” the third language of the South?: truth and fantasy about U. S. Spanish”).

The word ‘Spanglish’ was first used by Salvador Tio who was a Puerto Rican journalist. In 1952, Tio used this term in a newspaper article. Quite expectedly many consider him as the creator of this word. Some of the articles that were written by Tio in early days contained few Spanglish words which are humorous in nature. However, most of those words were not used later. As a result initially there was some confusion regarding legitimate examples of Spanglish. Apart from Tio there are experts like Nash and Fairclough who tried to gain insight into this language (Lipski, John M.

“Is “Spanglish” the third language of the South?: truth and fantasy about U. S. Spanish”). At present, Spanglish is considered as one of common languages especially in the places like Los Angeles where a major section of the population is ‘Hispanic’. . Some of the Spanglish sentences are found to be Spanish dominated whereas some are mostly English in nature. Over the last two decades, use of Spanglish has increased significantly with the increase in the number of people who are migrated from Latin American countries to United States.

English has collided with Spanish on a regular basis in workplaces, retail stores and classrooms (Castro, Janice. & Cook, Dan. “Language: Spanglish Spoken Here”). Such collisions between two of the most respected languages in the world has developed the growth track of Spanglish. The unique language is found to be very popular among the young people in United States. According to, Ilan Stavans who is an expert of Latino culture, Spanglish is a “jazzy and a very creative way of being Latino in the U.S. today” (Thomas, Jeffrey.

“Spanglish Offers Stepping-Stone to English”). Stavans is a self-declared promoter and admirer of Spanglish who has defined the language as “the verbal encounter between Hispano and Anglo civilizations” (Lipski, John M. “Is “Spanglish” the third language of the South?: truth and fantasy about U. S. Spanish”). Spanglish and Media Globalization In America people who speak in Spanglish are those who have enough knowledge of Spanish but follow American culture. They use clipped and shorter phrases rather than using longer and graceful expressions.

Such style is found to be very much suitable in America where ‘time is money’ (Castro, Janice. & Cook, Dan. “Language: Spanglish Spoken Here”). Most importantly Spanglish speaking people in US are likely to have the spending power of almost 200 billion dollar. As a result, many companies are eager to make the best out of this huge market. It is found that