Demystifying Language Mixing: Spanglish in School

Abstract

This article poses the question of how educators can put into practice the valorization of the vernacular and its use as a pedagogical resource. It provides a critical sociolinguistic orientation toward the use of Spanglish in schools. It gives a short descriptive overview of the linguistic features of Spanglish and responds to some of the misguided notions about language mixing. The article then looks at the use of Spanglish among young bilingual students doing an in-school reading activity and considers the ways that students' use of English, Spanish, and Spanglish might inform how educators see language use in the classroom. Finally, it considers the ramifications of embracing Spanglish as a social language, one that reflects and projects Latin@ borderland identity.

Key words:

• Spanglish
• language mixing
• sociolinguistics
• ethnolinguistic identity

Notes

¹In fact, there are at least three varieties of Spanglish (or Espanglish) in the United States, corresponding to the three main populations of Spanish-speaking Latinos: Mexican Americans in the Southwest, Texas, and other areas; Puerto Ricans in New York (Nuyorican); and Cubans in Florida. It is also important to recognize that even within the Mexican American communities of the U.S. border states there is a good deal of variety of use of and attitudes toward Spanglish. See Bayley and Schecter (2005) for a comparison of the variability of Latinos' situations and language choices between San Francisco, California, and San Antonio, Texas, as an example of the tremendous range and the problematic nature of making even qualified statements about how Latinos use language.

²See Ardila (2005) for more on the future of Spanglish.

³I use the term minoritized for two reasons. First, in many schools (including the one in which this study was conducted) Latin@ kids from Spanish-speaking homes are not a numerical minority. Second, minoritized better conveys a sense of agency and suggests there are forces acting upon groups in ways that marginalize them.

⁴I tried to make a conservative count based on general consensus among linguists of what constitutes code-mixing. However, there are many conflicting ways of interpreting code-mixing practices. For example, Poplack (1982) did not consider the insertion of a single word to be a switch, but other linguists do; or some linguists argue that nonce borrowing (spontaneous borrowing) shouldn't be included, but cultural borrowings can be (Callahan, 2004), and so forth.

⁵ Sánchez (1982) noted the use of agarrar in place of get in Chicano Spanish. She maintained that “these expressions, common in many Spanish-speaking nations and thus not unique Southwest Spanish, are quite frequent in Chicano communities” (p. 17). However, the examples given here do represent an extension of agarrar by bilinguals to include the range of meanings covered by the English get that are not used in colloquial Spanish in Mexico except perhaps along the U.S. border area, and they were verified by two informants (examples judged as colloquial uses among monolingual Mexicans have been excluded). An educated speaker of standard Spanish from Oaxaca, for example, judged these items as markers of “pocho Spanish.” See Moreno de Alba's (1990) Atlas Lingüístico de México for a description of the various geographically distinguished varieties of Spanish.

⁶The distinct meanings of ahorrar (save money) and guardar (save a computer file) have been replaced by salvar, corresponding to the extension of meanings of the English verb save.

⁷The principle of awareness, formulated by Claparède, states that “an impediment or disturbance in an automatic activity makes the author aware of this activity” (Vygotsky, 1986, p. 30). Hence, pragmatic switches go largely unnoticed, but crutches are more salient, because the need to use a crutch suddenly makes the speaker pay attention to his or her code-switching.

⁸ Santa Ana (2002) pointed out how, in the monolingual paradigm of language discourse in the United States, references to language almost invariably mean “the English language,” and anything else becomes “other.”