Hey, Curious305: How have the different cultures in South Florida influenced Spanglish?
Editor’s Note: This article was inspired by a question submitted from Miami Herald reader Reid Antonacchio through Curious305, our community-powered reporting series that solicits questions from readers about Miami-Dade, Broward, the Florida Keys and the rest of the Sunshine State. Submit your question here or scroll down to fill out our form.
Hey, Curious305: How has South Florida’s diverse culture influenced its Spanglish?
Ah, Spanglish. South Florida’s unofficial language.
It’s a reflection of life in Miami, the ultimate meeting place of English and Spanish, which have been co-existing since the dawn of time (OK, since colonialism).
Miami is not much of a linguistic battleground. If this were “Twilight,” Miami would be Team Switzerland, with how frequently people switch between English and Spanish.
After all, if you can’t remember la palabra que necesita decir, Spanglish lets you say it, en otro idioma.
But Spanglish gets a bad rap, sort of like a trashy or corrupted version of Spanish. But the derisive attitude toward Spanglish appears to be changing. And not just in Miami. Spanglish has become more popular in the U.S., especially among younger Hispanics.
Artists like Pitbull have English and Spanish lyrics in their music. Miami-born actress Jenny Lorenzo (best known for her Abuela character) specializes in Spanglish. Popular digital media companies We Are Mitú and Buzzfeed have videos and lists about Spanglish. And colleges across the country even teach about Spanglish.
But, it still has its controversy. Not everyone considers Spanglish to be a language. Some say it’s a dialect. Others see it as slang.
For Phillip Carter, an associate professor of linguistics at Florida International University and an expert on Miami English (yes, it’s a thing), Spanglish — the skill of switching from English to Spanish in conversation smoothly — is a “reflection of the linguistic capabilities” of people who live in a bilingual area where both languages are frequently used.
The practice has even led to the creation of Spanglish words, or words that are a mixture of English and Spanish, like parquear, clickear and textear.
How Spanglish arrived in South Florida
In South Florida, Spanglish began to take shape as the children of Cubans who fled to Miami in the 1960s began to learn English. It has evolved over the years as more Spanish speakers from other countries, with their own dialects and phrases, arrived. This isn’t just a Miami thing, though.
Languages have always influenced each other (more on this later) and language blending has been seen before with other immigrant groups that make it to the U.S.
As a linguist, Carter says it’s “remarkable to witness” in real-time “because Miami is the largest meeting of the two largest languages to have been in competition with each other in colonialism.”
Language blending usually happens during the “period of transition between the so-called immigrant language that slowly disappears with the children of immigrants and the grandchildren of immigrants and the acquisition of English,” Ilan Stavans, a professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College in Massachusetts, told PBS in an interview about his 2003 book “Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language.”
Stavans, who has taught courses in Spanglish, explained that unlike other immigrant groups who have settled in the country, Hispanics weren’t letting Spanish disappear.
Now in 2021, he considers Spanglish to be the “fastest growing hybrid language in the world.”
“I would say it is the most important linguistic phenomenon in the Hispanic world, in the Spanish-speaking world, and in the English-speaking world,” Stavans told an NBCLX TV station in Washington, D.C., in February.
Spanglish has its own ‘grammatical logic’
People who speak Spanglish also are not randomly stringing words together. Carter said Spanglish has its own “grammatical logic,” which is emerging not just in Miami but also in Puerto Rico, New York City, southern Texas and southern California, where people speak English and Spanish.
“You’ve got a bunch of different cultures living here. And a lot of different varieties of Spanish, and by the way, also English,” said Carter, who is also director of FIU’s Center for Humanities in Urban Environment. “And people are combining them in ways that makes sense for them.”
Some examples:
“I’m ordering food. ¿Quieres algo? Maybe un jamberger?”
“Hey, I can’t talk right now. Te llamo para tras.”
“Can you believe Amanda took off her shoes at the getty? She’s such a pata sucia. And that friend she was with? What a chonga.”
“Bro, this idiot almost crashed into me while I was driving en el parqueo del shopping.”
However, speaking Spanglish is not the same as “borrowing” words. English borrows the word “taco,” for example. In South Florida, everyone who lives here probably has arroz , cafecito and ropa vieja in their vocabulary, too.
We know, it’s a bit complicated. Pero like, this is how language works.
“Languages influence each other, just like cultures do when they come into contact with each other,” Carter said.
Language evolves by interacting with the structures of other languages (think phonetics and word choices) over a long period of time, Carter said. English would be different today without French influence. The same goes with Spanish and its Arabic influence.
That’s one of the reasons why it’s difficult to know how many languages exist. Carter says it’s estimated there are 5,000 to 7,000 spoken languages in the world.
At least 128 languages were spoken at home in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties between 2009 and 2013, including English, Spanish, French Creole, Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew and German, according to data the U.S. Census Bureau released in 2015.
Language also always follows culture and politics, he said.
That explains why the Spanglish you hear in Miami, which has a strong link to the Caribbean and South America, is different from the Spanglish in Texas and California, which has more Spanish speakers from Mexico and Central America, he said.
It’s also why certain words in Spanish mean something different depending on whether you’re Cuban, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Colombian.
And if you can’t find a word that explains what you want to say, you could always make it up. Who knows, you might end up creating Miami’s next Spanglish word.
Dale.
This story was originally published September 2, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
