Add Languages, Mix Well

Re “A Hybrid Tongue or Slanguage?” Dec. 27: As someone who has learned to speak Spanish, I keep Spanish and English very separate and I try to carefully avoid Spanglish. However, I love to hear it. I think creative use of language is a window into the speaker’s experience and culture.

I work in San Francisco Juvenile Hall and hear Spanglish all the time. Sometimes in translating for monolingual kids, an American youngster will use troque or another Spanglish word and is surprised when I tell him, no, that’s not it. The youngster from Guatemala that we’re talking to understands camionetta. I also mentor young people, mostly Latinos, from the inner city. I tell them that if they want to be truly bilingual, they need to study Spanish in school and learn to speak proper Spanish with a proper vocabulary.

I learned to speak Spanish in a Mexican bank in L.A., and my vocabulary is in part from Mexico City. The bank distinguished itself from American banks using Spanish by carefully using a Mexican vocabulary instead of the easily detected Spanish and Spanglish vocabulary. When 20% of your population speaks a language, it’s not an immigrant language, it’s an American language. L.A.’s La Opinion reads differently than Mexico’s La Reforma. La Opinion uses educated and cultured Spanish but the choice of vocabulary and construction reflects its American base. The wonderful thing about language is that it is infinitely adaptable, and as cultures clash and mix in the United States, particularly in Southern California, so does language.

Jack Duggan

Mill Valley, Calif.

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Hispanics’ use of Spanglish as a normal, daily way of communicating with one another constitutes a silencing of a rich and brilliant past, a severing of roots. Spanish has been through the ages the language of some of the most admired and revered artists and humanists the world has ever seen: Cervantes, Lope de Vega, St. Theresa and Sor Juana, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the list goes on and on. Ten Spanish-language writers have been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

On the other hand, alas, a Spanglish humanist tradition has yet to be established.

If language can bestow people with dignity and sophistication, Spanglish may just be doing the opposite. Its generalized use may impoverish and handicap.

Rodrigo Palacios

Walnut

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This article reminds me of the place where I was born, Morocco. It is a place where French, Arabic, Spanish and Berber dialects are mixed in unpredictable ways. They do form what is commonly referred to as the Moroccan dialect. It is not slang. People such as English First’s Jim Boulet Jr. ought to widen their horizons and see beyond what comes first and second. What Hispanics are doing here is as old as humanity: playing with words and creating new ones. Let them enrich us all with vocabulary that will most probably be seen as old-fashioned in less than 20 years.

Though I learned Spanish in Argentina and sometimes have difficulty understanding Spanglish, I am always surprised by how skillful the Spanglish speaker is in adjusting his Spanglish one way or another to make sure I understand it all. This is what I have always done in Morocco, either going 100% Arabic when talking to my grandmother, 50% French and 50% Arabic with my siblings and something in between when meeting a stranger and then adjusting.

Hamza Benamar

Simi Valley

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Spanglish is sort of an “Esperanto-ita” (mas o menos). It rolls off the tongue so bien that way. And everyone have a guten tag, OK?

Harvey Pearson

Los Angeles