Spanglish

This article is about English influence in the Spanish spoken in the USA. See Spanglish spelling for the English spelling reform proposal.

Spanglish is a name used to refer to a range of language contact phenomena, primarily in the speech of the Hispanic population of the USA, which is exposed to both Spanish and English. These phenomena are a product of close border contacts or large bilingual communities, such as along the United States–Mexico border, in Florida and in New York City.

The word "Spanglish" is a popular name for these phenomena, but not a technical one. Linguists refer to the various phenomena involved in "Spanglish" by a variety of terms: code mixing, code switching, loanwords, language contact, and more generally, bilingualism.

Spanish and English have interpenetrated in any number of ways. For example, a bilingual fluent speaker speaking to another bilingual fluent speaker may indulge in code switching and utter a sentence such as: "I'm sorry I cannot attend next week's meeting, pero tengo una obligación de negocios en Boston, pero espero que I'll be back for the meeting the week after."

More common than that are word borrowings from English into Spanish, using false cognates with their English sense, or calquing idiomatic English expressions. Some examples:

• The word carpeta exists in standard Spanish, meaning "folder", but in the USA it is common to see it used to mean "carpet". This is a straight borrowing of an English word, as is the very common verb chequear/checar "to check", the noun parkin "parking", and countless others.
• The word aseguranza "insurance", instead of standard Spanish seguro (cognate to English "secure"). The Spanglish noun aseguranza is formed from the verb asegurar ("to insure") in a way that calques how the English noun "insurance" is formed from the verb "insure".
• In standard Spanish aplicación means "effort"; the word for a job or a school application is solicitud; that is, Spanish aplicación and English "application" are false cognates. Using false cognates with their English sense, like using Spanish aplicación in the sense of English "application", is another form of Spanglish.
• The expression llamar para atrás is calqued literally from English "call back"; compare standard Spanish devolver la llamada ("return the call"). This is an example of calquing an idiomatic English phrase into Spanish.

See also Languages in the United States, Yanito from Gibraltar, inglés de escalerilla in the Spanish Mediterranean coast.