Is "Spanglish" the third language of the South?: truth and fantasy about U. S. Spanish

Abstract

Spanish first arrived on the North American mainland in what is now part of the southern United States, and the first stable contacts between Spanishand English-speaking colonies also occurred in these same regions. Today with upwards of 35 million native speakers Spanish is the de facto second language of the United States (and the first language of many regions), and the United States is on the verge of becoming the world’s fourth-largest Spanish-speaking nation (counting only native speakers). Even today the largest number of Spanish speakers in the United States resides in southern latitudes, and the 2000 census presents dramatic evidence that the areas of most rapid growth of the Spanish-speaking population in the last decade and a half are southern states such as Georgia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Alabama. If we temporarily exclude Texas, the majority of Spanish speakers in the southern states have arrived during the past half century, many during the past decade, although a few long-standing enclaves continue to exist. In terms of demographics—and increasingly in terms of economic and political strength—Spanish is clearly the second language of the South, mostly representing varie ties originating in Cuba and Mexico, but also in several Caribbean, Central and South American nations. In addition to speaking Spanish and—usually—English, Spanish speakers living in the United States typically exhibit a wide range of language-contact phenomena that have led observers in this country and abroad to postulate that a new creation is arising from this sustained bilingual contact. Some call it this and some call it that, but the one name that everyone recognizes is `Spanglish,’ a word whose very morphology connotes hybridity, mixture, and—to the most cynical—illegitimate birth. But what is `Spanglish’? Does it really exist? Can the thousands of individuals worldwide who use the term with conviction—albeit with a wide variety of meanings—be describing a non-existent entity? Like the search for `family values,’ `democracy,’ and `national security,’ `Spanglish’ has become a deeply-rooted cultural construct highly charged with emotion while eluding a widely accepted definition. Since neither the term itself nor the notion of a `third language’ arising from the head-on collision between English and Spanish is likely to disappear anytime soon, it is imperative that serious empirical research complement the popular chaos that has embraced aspects of mass hysteria, conspiracy theories, and media feeding frenzy, while doing little to elucidate the actual linguistic situation of Latino bilinguals.

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