SpanglishWhat is Spanglish?

Spanglish refers to the code-switching of English and Spanish, in the speech of people who speak parts of two languages, or whose normal language is different from that of the country where they live. For example, the Hispanic population of the United States and the British population in Argentina use varieties of Spanglish. Sometimes the creole spoken in Spanish holiday resorts which are exposed to both Spanish and English is called Spanglish. The similar code switching used in Gibraltar is called Llanito. Spanglish may also be known by a regional name. Some people tend to believe that the "Tex-Mex" spoken in Texas, is also Spanglish, which is not the case; neither is the case of the "Ladino" spoken in New Mexico, because both are language varieties of Mexican Spanish.Spanglish is not a pidgin language. It is totally informal; there are no hard-and-fast rules.There is no clear demarcation between Spanglish and simple bad Spanish or English. "Parquear" for "to park" is clear deliberate Spanglish; "actualmente" for "actually" rather than "at present" is closer to erroneous use of a false friend, and ambiguous as it has a clear, but different, meaning in true Spanish.These phenomena are produced by close border contact and large bilingual communities on the northern side along the United States-Mexico border and California, Oregon, Washington, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, Puerto Rico, The City of New York, and Chicago. It is also important to mention that the bilingual communities on the southern side along the Mexican-American border prefer to use only Spanish while in Mexico, where the term pocho is applied to people who use Spanglish words and expressions.It is common in Panama, where the 96-year (1903–1999) U.S. control of the Panama Canal influenced much of local society, especially among the former residents of the Panama Canal Zone, the Zonians. Some version of Spanglish, whether by that name or another, is likely to be used wherever speakers of both languages mix.In the late 1940s, the Puerto Rican linguist Salvador Tió coined the terms Spanglish, and the less commonly used inglañol[1] for English spoken with some Spanish terms.