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Stavans, Ilan. Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language. New York: Rayo/Harper Collins, 2003. 288 pp. ISBN 0-06-008775-7
In almost every bilingual situation around the world, some form of language mixture is found. Ilan Stavans examines this phenomenon in the Chicano/Latino context in Spanglish: The making of a new American language. The term Spanglish, while common in the general public and among Spanish-English bilinguals themselves, is not generally used by linguists; it is problematic due to its imprecision. Does it refer to the incorporation of English-origin words into a Spanish morpho-syntactic matrix? Frequently cited examples such as parquear la troca support this definition. Expressions quoted just as often, like vacunar la carpeta, belie a more complex situation, as both vacunar and carpeta are Spanish words imbued with the meaning of their English cognates vacuum and carpet. Furthermore, entire phrases, some of which violate the rules of Spanish grammar and others that do not, also find themselves under the Spanglish umbrella. Llamar p'atrás, ¿cómo te gustó? and cambié mi mente are often noted. Finally, Spanglish seems for many to also encompass the concept of code-switching, or the use of more than one language variety in a single interaction, itself a complex and heterogeneous practice. For decades, linguists have struggled to describe this diversity effectively and efficiently from grammatical, social and interactional perspectives. Almost invariably, the mixing of languages in contact is disparaged both by bilinguals and monolinguals, and the mixture of Spanish and English, both in the U.S. and throughout the Spanish-speaking world, is no exception. The term Spanglish is also problematic, then, because it is almost inseparable from this negative social evaluation. Its use, however, signals the reader that this is not a sociolinguistic analysis of varieties of U.S. Spanishes characterized by the mixture of Spanish and English. Instead, Stavans' approach is both personal and popular.
The book is comprised of three main sections: an introductory essay, a Spanglish lexicon and a Spanglish translation of "first parte, chapter uno" of Don Quixote de la Mancha. This eclectic approach to the topic is not surprising. For years, Stavans has been a transdisciplinary chronicler and defender of Spanglish. His class at Amherst College was perhaps the first college course to focus exclusively on the cultural and...