If your neighbour says to you El aire acondicionado no está cooling porque tiene tupida la pipería, would you understand that the machine isn’t cooling because the pipes are blocked? Are they speaking in Spanish? Or is it English? Neither. These days, it’s not out of the ordinary to hear phrases like these in the Spanish-speaking communities of some American states, like Florida, Georgia, Texas, California or New York. It’s a morphosyntactic and semantic fusion of English and Spanish, which has become known as “Spanglish.”

But, is it a new language or a distortion of existing ones?

The term Spanglish was coined between 1965 and 1970 to describe this phenomenon which was born in the suburbs of the main U.S. cities, whose rapid spread provoked curiosity in some, but worry in others.

Here are some examples:

Voy a la washatería a lavar la ropa (I’m going to the washatería to do some laundry)
(washatería from to wash, with lavandería (laundrette), with the same meaning as the latter)

María va a chequear al baby (María’s going to chequear the baby)
(chequear from to check, and comprobar; bebé , baby)

Mi honey tiene que vacunar la carpeta porque está muy sucia (My honey has to vacunar the carpeta because it’s very dirty)
(honey, meaning cariño; vacunar from to vacuum, aspirar; carpeta from carpet, alfombra)

Can anyone stop the rise of Spanglish? This is what the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (ANLE) (North-American Spanish Language Academy) is trying to do. Their mission is to help implement the correct use of Spanish amongst the 50 million Hispanics who live in the United States.

Meanwhile, Spanglish continues to cause controversy. Among its strongest supporters is the Mexican professor Ilán Stavans, who not only published a Spanglish dictionary, but also translated Miguel de Cervantes’ foremost work, “Don Quijote de la Mancha”: “In un palacete de La Mancha of wich nombre no quiero remembrearme […]”, which many believe would have the author turning over in his grave.

“Verbos” like parquear my car ( estacionar, to park), wachar la tele (ver, to watch), fowardear un email (enviar, to forward) are considered by some to be the result of a development in the two languages. For its critics, however, it represents a threat to the hispanic culture and language. In either case, the majority of experts believe that it’s a phenomenon that is likely to disappear with time.

Of course, while I respect the freedom to speak as one wishes, and don’t want to bother anyone, I think we should differentiate between linguistic loans, like líder, suéter or mánager, words like fútbol, bistec, iceberg, sándwich or apartamento (all recognised by the RAE – the Royal Spanish Academy), and language distortion. Perhaps we should make the effort to speak correctly, and not enter into the laziness of using a disfigured mishmash. After all, Spanglish isn’t a language, more a cocktail of badly-spoken English and Spanish.

What’s your opinion on Spanglish?