[Linganth] Fw: The Weekly Wordsmith — On Spanglish. Acz

Mon May 18 17:30:09 UTC 2026

________________________________
From: Planet Word <social at planetwordmuseum.org>
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2026 6:03:12 AM
To: Zentella, Ana <azentella at ucsd.edu>
Subject: The Weekly Wordsmith — On Spanglish

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ON SPANGLISH

Ana Celia Zentella

Professor Emerita in the Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego

“Spanglish” is a debated and often misunderstood term that first appeared in a Puerto Rican newspaper article by Salvador Tio’ in 1948. In 2023, the Pew Research Center reported that 63% of U.S. Latinus* report speaking Spanglish at least sometimes, most frequently (72%) among the second generation. Does Spanglish refer to a mishmash of two languages, a third language, or a style of speaking? Is it a positive or negative label? These questions become more relevant as the 68 million U.S. Latinus are en route to becoming the largest U.S. ethnic group by 2045.

Although 60% of U.S. Latinus (my preferred gender-inclusive term) are of Mexican background, eight other countries each have over one million representatives, and eleven more exceed 75,000. What do Latinus think about the labels that refer to them? In the 2023 Pew report, half of the U.S. Latinu adults surveyed had never heard the term “Latinx,” and only 4% used it; most preferred “Hispanic,” “Latino,” or their country of origin. Each country speaks its distinct variety of Spanish, but increasing violence against all Latinus is further fueled by attacks against their Spanish and Spanglish.

In 2010, 71% of 115 U.S. Latinus I interviewed with Adam Schwartz approved of the “Spanglish” label (mainly speakers of Spanglish themselves); 25% disapproved, and 4% were indifferent. But the great majority (94%) defined Spanglish in neutral or positive terms, and decades of research have documented how most Spanglish speakers honor the complex rules of both English and Spanish.

Spanglish is an in-group and informal style that blends both languages through adapted (“parquear,” meaning “to park”) and unadapted (“el internet”) English loan words, word-for-word translations of borrowed phrases (“llamar para atra’s”/“to call back”), and switching languages between or within sentences. The New York Puerto Rican children I talked to for my book Growing Up Bilingual honored the grammatical rules of both languages in 95% of 1,685 code switches. They switched languages for topic or role shifting, quoting, requests, and translating. They often switched complete sentences, e.g., an eight-year-explained, “We speak both. Hablamos los dos.”

The Spanglish label, along with Chinglish, Taglish, etc. for switches between Chinese, Tagalog or other languages and English force us to confront how language often masks racial and ethnic prejudices by imposing national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. The insistence on maintaining strict borders between languages, as if bilinguals were two monolinguals joined at the tongue, has encouraged what I call “La Migra Bilingue” — critics who forbid crossing language borders, like the Border Patrol. Even Spanglish speakers may think this way, like the high schooler who insisted: “Pochos are people who mix Spanish and English y no deben hablar así” (“and they shouldn’t speak that way”). For those of us who speak it proudly with each other, alongside Spanish and English with monolinguals, Spanglish is an affirmation of our identity that says, vividly and unapologetically: “We speak both because we are both.”

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Ana Celia Zentella is Professor Emerita in the Ethnic Studies Department of the University of California San Diego and a member of Planet Word’s Advisory Board. An anthro-political linguist, she studies U.S. Latinu varieties of Spanish and English and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023. She is also the author of the award-winning book Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York, co-author of Spanish in New York: Language Contact, Dialect Leveling, and Structural Continuity, and editor of Multilingual San Diego and Multilingual Philadelphia, written by her students.

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