What is Spanglish, and where did that term originate?
Spanglish refers to the code-switching of “English” and “Spanish”, in the speech of the Hispanic population of the United States, Gibraltar and most Spanish holiday resorts, who are exposed to both Spanish and English. Spanglish is a popular, but not technical, term for this bilingual language contact, known to linguists as code switching, or loanword usage. Linguists do not consider Spanglish a term useful in discussing these phenomena, because it groups linguistic phenonema that do not necessarily belong together; many things labelled Spanglish are very different from each other. The novel Yo-Yo Boing!, by Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi, is an example of a fully bilingual literary exercise incorporating code-switching, bilingualism, and Spanish. For example, the speech of a fully bilingual Spanish and English speaker in the U.S. who spontaneously switches between Spanish and English usages in mid-sentence, linguistically is someone very different from a monolingual Puerto Rican
Spanglish refers to the code-switching of “English” and “Spanish”, in the speech of the Hispanic population of the United States, Gibraltar and most Spanish holiday resorts, who are exposed to both Spanish and English. Distribution These phenomena are produced by close border contact and large bilingual communities along the United States-Mexico border and California, Oregon, Washington, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, Puerto Rico, The City of New York, and Chicago. It is common in Panama, where the 96-year (1903-1999) U.S. control of the Panama Canal influenced much of local society, especially among the former residents of the Panama Canal Zone, the Zonians. Spanglish also is known by a regional name, e.g. “Tex-Mex” in Texas, (cf. “Tex-Mex cuisine”). In Mexico, the term pochismo applies to Spanglish words and expressions. Spanglish is not a pidgin language. In the late 1940s, the Puerto Rican linguist Salvador Tió coined the terms Spanglish and inglañol, a converse phenomenon wh
