Spanglish

Anonymous astutely observed in response to my last blog

This whole piece of legislation is self-defeating. All my married friends with kids (the smart ones at least) are rushing to enroll their kids in "dual-immersion" programs where they learn Spanish as well as English. Frankly, in about 20 years, there will be two groups of people in the US: Those who can speak Spanish, and those who can't, and the ones who can't will be fetching coffee for their bosses who do speak Spanish. People in the Southwest and Florida have been using Spanish for centuries and that's not changing, and just about every company now does gazillions in business with Latin America. You just have to know the language there, period, to get ahead.

In some parts of the US, including especially Texas, speakers of English and Spanish who interact on a regular basis have created mixtures of English and Spanish that go by a variety of names such as Spanglish, Tex-Mex, Poco, as well as others. These mixtures have persisted for quite a long time. In fact, the odds are that they have existed from the first days of contact between English and Spanish speakers since there would have been a need for communication.

Throughout the world when people speaking different languages come into regular contact, often in the course of trade, pidgin languages emerge that have a highly simplified syntax -- rigid subject-verb-object word order, invariant word forms (no singular vs. plural inflection, no conjugations, no declinations), a simple preverbal negative marker, only a few pronouns, only a few prepositions, etc. In some cases pidgins undergo "creolization" becoming full-fledged languages in their own right. We find a French creole in Haiti. There are English creaoles in the Carribean and one off the coast of S. Carolina called "Gullah."

The very existence of Spanglish or Tex-Mex is testimony to the resilience of Spanish. While other languages spoken in Texas have long since died off, Spanish is alive and well and is not going to go away. Obviously, since Spanish is not going anywhere, the most useful approach of the United States is to become officially bilingual. That will doubtless distress speakers of other languages but there is no way to please everyone in such a matter.