Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language [Anglais] [Broché]

From its title and the author's academic background, I expected this book would be a more scholarly work. I wish that Prof. Stavan had paid more attention to defining and describing Spanglish and less attention to defending it against attack. After all, Spanish and English have been in contact for several centuries, and not even the most extreme purists deny that some cross-language influences are at least a linguistic reality, if not, as this author insists, a linguistic necessity. But just what is and what is not Spanglish? Stavan says (p.3) that it is the "tongue of the uneducated." In Puerto Rico, many highly educated bilinguals mix the two languages on occasion, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. I recall a Puerto Rican colleague in my university bragging about his son who had just graduated from what sounded like "jail" (Yale). My own native English is peppered with useful words like "tapón" (=traffic jam), "rejas" (=iron grillwork), and "tostones" (=fried plantains). The English-speaking operator for Banco Popular's Pay-by-Phone service asks you if you want your payment to take effect on "the next labor day." In the 70's, former Governor Ferre started one of his campaign speeches with "¿Cuáles son los issues?"

Prof. Stavans, an immigrant from Mexico, is himself is a good example of such an educated bilingual. In describing his early days in New York, he writes (p.2) "I regularly made my shopping..." where the monolingual English speaker would say "did my shopping" (Spanish hacer has multiple English equivalents). I counted no less than six cases in which he used "voice" (instead of "word"), presumably as a translation of Spanish "vox", as in (p.60) "Voices from the English used in Spain and the Americas..." Are these examples also Spanglish? If not, why not, and if so, is the uneducated condition really a requirement? The author gives us no clue as to where to draw the line.

The extensive Spanglish lexicon occupies 188 pages of the 274-page book, and it poses yet more puzzling questions. The author states (p. 55) "[Spanglish] is an oral vehicle of communication," then follows this with (p. 56) "The spelling I have in every entry is the one most commonly used in popular culture." If Spanglish is oral, where did those bizarre spellings come from (e.g., "benkenpura" = baking powder)? Unfortunately, no specific sources are given for the written forms, so we do not know if they actually occurred, or were concocted for this list.

In addition to such phonetic spellings of badly-pronounced English words, the lexicon also has a great many "Spanglish" items that are perfectly good Spanish words, according to my 1973 Simon & Shuster dictionary. Just among the words beginning with letter a are these: absentismo, académico, apelación, adobe, agente, apartamento, archivar, armada, asistir. Furthermore, several assimilated English loanwords (e.g. parquear, aparcar `to park') were accepted by the Spanish Academy decades ago. Exactly what is Spanglish about them?

Despite these unanswered questions and contradictions, I found the book entertaining, especially the author's recounting of his exposure to multicultural New York and his tongue-in-cheek Spanglish translation of Don Quixote, which demonstrates just how clever the bilingual mind can be.

You see, I read a description of the book that described it as a serious look at the phenomenon of "Spanglish." It does have that (and it is quite good) - but 2/3 of the book is a Spanglish to English dictionary. While interesting, it was not what I had planned on reading when I had requested it from my local library. I just wanted you perspective buyers to know ahead of time.

Also, if you don't have a decent command of Spanish, this book will be pretty hard for you to read. If you have a hard time following the jokes in a George Lopez stand-up routine, you'll have just as hard of a time reading this book because he fills it full of Spanglish. While entertaining to us bilinguals, I wanted warn you before you bought it.

Half the book reads like some kind of ranting reciprocal bigotry. The author jumps all over the linguisists at the RAE while revealing a lack of linguistic awareness on his own part. He actually puts forth the assertion that Basques and Catalunyians prefer to speek Euskera and Catalan over Spanish because they felt alienated by Felipe Gonzalez, the late President of Spain. ---Duuhhh! Why do you think they prefer what they do? Get a clue! Also, not relevant to so called "spanglish" anyway - just a politically motivated chip on the shoulder.

Furthermore, the book doesn't present a plausible analysis of unintelligibility between the dialects of the language.

Look, the biggest obstacle to mutual intelligibility is with respect to semantics and syntax, hispanicized english words are a lesser issue. Many american hispanics actually think in english and then speak as if giving literal translations into spanish rather than speaking combinations of words that have meaning in spanish. For example, when the drain got blocked in my bathroom sink in my apartment in Madrid, I reported it to the manager as a direct translation of " the drain is blocked". Well, I got nothing but a blank stare and fumbled an explanation for five minutes until I finally hit on the right combination of words that could be understood --"the bathroom sink is clogged".

Now she knew to send the plumber up with the snake. Many american hispanics would make the same error I did - this is why in Spain, they offer courses called "spanish for native spanish speakers" for little or no cost to immigrants. The tendency is to think in english even though they can't really speak english( as a peculiar anecdote, all the mexican restaurants in Madrid have placards in the window that read " mexican spoken here" and believe it or not, the placards are actually written in english -I've met a number of mexicans in Spain and as I said, they don't speak a lick of english). This is a bizzare aspect of american dialects that the author doesn't seem to observe, least of all to analyze. Similar issues exist in terms of syntax, like saying "to have an orgasm" as in english, when in spanish it's properly said "to achieve orgasm".

The second half of the book, is presented as a "spanglish" lexicon although many of the words listed have neither a derivation in english nor spanish, they're simply words that immigrants from different hispanic countries made up when they got to the US. Perfectly legitimate, but perhaps not aptly titled "spanglish", perhaps it should be called "HispanUSA" instead.

Lastly, the lexicon section only has so called "spanglish" words and their english translations. If the proper castillian usage was also listed, at least it might help speakers of different spanish dialects understand each other better, making the book considerably more useful. It is, after all, not just about Mexico, Spain and Puerto Rico. There is lots of geography and are hundreds of dialects. Better luck with the revised edition.