Welch 1

Abby Welch

5/01/2022

WRIT 2 - Academic Writing

Middle Ground: An Insight into the ‘Spanglish’ Proto-Language

‘Spanglish’, a proto-language consisting of borrowed words from both English and

Spanish, has become an increasingly popular form of communication for many Chicanx/Latinx

communities in the United States brought on by close language contact between these coexisting

language communities. ‘Spanglish’,,’ as seen from a linguistic perspective, struggles to be

viewed be seen as an “official” language, though researchers have identified rules within

syntactical and phonetic patterns consistent with how other languages are defined. Linguistic

journals and articles are interested in ‘Spanglish’ grammatical construction, in how ‘Spanglish’

is linguistically constructed, drawing on natural language processing statistical models and

morphological/phonetic data transcriptions to assess their claims. However, ‘Spanglish’ is not

just constructed morphologically, but has been influenced by socio-cultural elements such as

American vs. Mexican attitudes towards Spanish, ‘linguistic terrorism’, and racial identity. In

contrast to linguistic researchers, academics within the discipline of Chicanx Studies emphasize

personal anecdotes, literature reviews, and historical events to explain ‘Spanglish’ construction

and its impact on Chicanx communities. Understanding of the complexities of ‘Spanglish’ as a

genre cannot be achieved fully met without diving into the perspectives of both disciplines. This

essay will argue that ‘Spanglish’ as a genre is constructed by the juxtaposition between the

lexical and phonological arguments of the linguistics discipline and its socio-cultural

implications emphasized by the Chicanx Studies discipline.

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Linguistics and Chicanx Studies both focus their understanding of ‘Spanglish’ on

decoding the daily phraseology and lexical usage of the language. Linguistic journals have taken

a particular interest in understanding how the syntax and discourse patterns of English have

extended into ‘Spanglish’; Otheguy’s and Stern’s article mention “reductions in the inventory of

structural mechanisms, such as those in the verb tenses and moods, but we also find that certain

grammatical processes occur more frequently and that their applicability is extended to

additional contexts…the use of subject personal pronouns, which in Spanish can be either

present or absent (canto ~ yo canto, both ‘I sing’)” (Otheguy, Stern, 2010, p.93) as being some of

the most pertinent examples of these extensions. Otheguy and Stern develop their argument

through providing the example of ‘cantar’ and English vs. Spanish subject pronouns, using the

morphological differences between how English and Spanish express these subject pronouns to

convince the audience that ‘yo canto’ is becoming more common in ‘Spanglish’ than ‘canto’ due

to the necessity of subject pronouns in English. Otheguy and Stern use the example of ‘yo canto’

as evidence of syntactical assimilation between Spanish and English caused by close language

contact. Given the surgency of stating subject pronouns despite already being implied through

verb conjugation endings in Spanish, Otheguy and Stern craft their argument around an already

well-established idea within the linguistics discipline that when two languages are exposed to

each other for long enough, proto-languages like ‘Spanglish’ will develop inherently. This article

focuses heavily on word choice to create their argument, emphasizing linguistic-distinctive

terminology such as ‘verb tenses and moods’ and ‘subject pronouns.’ This writing style with a

central focus on morphological inconsistencies is a standard argument style of linguistics

academic writing.
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Chicanx Studies academics expand on this theory by considering the sociological impact

English-Spanish language contact has had on the public perception of ‘Spanglish.’have chosen to

take a much different approach to writing about syntax. In contrast to the linguistics discipline,

Rachel Showstack centralizes her argument around the social hierarchies associated with English

vs. Spanish classroom language use, using her interviews and interactions with ‘Layla’ as

evidence of these institutionalized ideals. Showstack focuses her argument on the idea of ‘verbal

hygiene’, “struggling to control the classroom linguistic norms by defining what is acceptable

and what is unacceptable in the Spanish language, and correcting the students whenever they

used language that she did not consider to be acceptable within the linguistic norms of the class.”

(Showstack, 2015, p.354) Similar to what Otheguy and Stern hypothesized, Showstack notes a

rejection of ‘Spanglish’ not grammatically, but societally. However, while Otheguy and Stern

developed their argument through analyzing morphological patterns of ‘Spanglish’, Contrastive

to the Linguistics discipline, Showstack takes a more humanistic approach by develops her

argument using interviews and personal anecdotes to highlight present real-world examples of

prescriptivist attitudes toward ‘Spanglish.’ Throughout Showstack’s article, she follows a student

named ‘Layla’, documenting her use of ‘Spanglish’ in a traditional classroom setting. Showstack

highlights Layla’s interaction with another student, Sarai, whom Layla claims uses says is using

‘so’ incorrectly when speaking ‘Spanglish.’ Rather than focusing her attention on the what would

be considered grammatically ‘accurate’ based on traditional trends in the “incorrectness” of ‘so’

as a word within the context of the ‘Spanglish’ speech pattern, Showstack focuses her argument

around how notes that Layla “positions herself as an authority, this time with respect to language

(a role that is generally expected of language teachers.)” (Showstack, 2015, p.394) Showstack’s

argument builds upon Otheguy and Stern’s because she is not emphasizing the linguistic rule
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itself, but how individuals given higher authority impose these linguistic rules on others.

Analyzing ‘correctness’ from both a grammar and semantical standpoint connect the Linguistics

and Chicanx Studies disciplines; the Linguistics disciplines uses language contact between

English and Spanish to explain morphological inconsistencies in ‘Spanglish’, whereas the

Chicanx Studies discipline use anecdotes from current speakers to highlight current negative

dialogue around these inconsistencies.

The parallelisms between the two disciplines become increasingly prevalent when

looking at the differences between how possible construction of ‘Spanglish’ is collected. The

research methods and analysis procedures used for collecting data within the Linguistics and

Chicanx Studies disciplines in regards to ‘Spanglish’ differ quite drastically. Linguistics

researchers use computational linguistics procedures and statistical language modeling programs

to help them construct potential sentence structures in proto-languages like ‘Spanglish.’ Juan

Franco, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, designed a statistical experiment

containing bigram and trigram ‘Spanglish’ language models where each data set contained a

different percentage of words in English, Spanish, and Spanglish in order toto rank generated

sentences from incoherent to coherent. His findings concluded that “the bigram and trigram

models worked better than the other models that were used. Although the sentences generated by

the UTI software were obtained with the help of a context-free grammar file, it is evident from

Table 3 that the model that produced the majority of Spanglish phrases was the 3-gram model.”

(Franco, Solorio, 2007, p.8) As the computational linguistics field continues to become

increasingly prevalent in linguistics research, the more these types of statistical models become

an indicator of the discipline. As the Linguistics discipline continues to expand in its different

data collection methods, the discipline becomes more interdisciplinary between STEM and
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Humanities research. In opposition, Chicanx Studies continues to be a primarily Humanities-

based discipline, useings literature reviews and quotes from other Chicanx influences to explain

misunderstanding potentially incoherent ‘Spanglish’ sentences. In Kim Diaz’s article, “A Process

Metaphysics and Lived Experience Analysis of Chicanxs, Spanglish, Mexicans and

Mexicanidad*”, Diaz quotes passages from Octavio Paz, a Mexican poet and diplomat who

received the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature. Paz describes ‘Spanglish’ as being a ‘bastardized

language’, a viewpoint which Diaz acknowledges is shared by many Mexican American

communities who look down on Spanglish speakers for their inability to use “correct” Spanish.

These attitudes towards an ‘incoherent, intolerable’ use of a Spanish-English hybrid language

Diaz emphasizes in her writings match the findings of Franco’s statistical models which

concluded coherence was much more prevalent in conversations containing overtly more English

or Spanish use. Diaz uses different literature reviews throughout her article to shape the

‘Mexicanidad’ perspective for her audience, a term she defines as “a set of immutable properties

such as speaking Spanish, holding Mexican customs and beliefs, and dressing a certain way—

like a real Mexican—and not speaking, behaving, or dressing like a pachuco, which according to

Paz, is a type of bastardization of the true Mexican.” (Diaz, 2018, p.47) Diaz’s analysis of these

literatures provides a perspective of the lived experiences faced by many Chicanx communities

as an overarching socio-cultural explanation for the findings Franco discovered.

The Linguistics and Chicanx Studies disciplines each take a unique approach to

identifying and analyzing the complexities of the ‘Spanglish’ genre. More logical in nature, the

linguistics disciplines often note tangible workings of the language, such as distinct

morphological or phonological differences from English and Spanish that influence ‘Spanglish’

grammar rules. The use of computer-generated sentences, interviews, and natural language
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processing programs have helped determine many language patterns consistent with the

‘Spanish’ language. However, the Chicanx Studies discipline helps shed light on the institutions,

power dynamics, and social hierarchies that enforce many of these linguistic changes by

gathering perspectives from within the Chicanx community and accessing different literatures.

‘Spanglish’ as a genre is multi-faceted and intricate, but given both discussed disciplines, we can

view ‘Spanglish’ as being representative of the Chicanx community, borrowing many of its

syntactic structures from English while retaining its own language identity enough to re-define

itself as “U.S. Spanish”, as some linguistic researchers might say.

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Works Cited

1. Otheguy, R., & Stern, N. (2011). On so-called Spanglish. International Journal of Bilingualism,

15(1), 85-100.

2. Showstack, R. E. (2015). Institutional representations of ‘Spanish’ and ‘Spanglish’: Managing

competing discourses in heritage language instruction. Language and Intercultural

Communication, 15(3), 341-361.

3. Franco, J. C., & Solorio, T. (2007, February). Baby-steps towards building a Spanglish language

model. In International conference on intelligent text processing and computational linguistics (pp.

75-84). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

4. Díaz, K. (2018). A Process Metaphysics and Lived Experience Analysis of Chicanxs, Spanglish,

Mexicans and Mexicanidad. Journal of World Philosophies, 3(1), 44-52.