Ángel López-García
Universitat de València, Spain

Spanglish, a twofold variety of Spanish

Key words: Spanglish, performative norm, bilingual, periphery

According to the call of papers of the conference “non-dominant national varieties of pluricentric languages … are the varieties that are small by the number of their speakers and their symbolic power, and are not the primary norm-setting centres of the language.” Students do not always agree on the sociolinguistic evaluation of Spanglish –they think it should be either blamed or praised– but there are no queries about its linguistic classification as a dialect of Spanish.

Nevertheless, in the US Spanglish is spoken by over fifty million people and it exhibits a high imaginary power as a symbol of Latino culture. It exists, then, a non-dominant variety of a pluricentric language that can be characterized neither as small nor as lacking symbolic power. It could be argued that Spanglish fulfills the third required property: to be rejected by the “norm-settig centres of the language”. This is true: actually, the dictionnary on line of the Spanish Academy (DRAE) defines Spanglish as a mixing of Spanish and English elements where both of these languages get deformed. However, by the time being widespread mass media in Spanglish that are produced in bilingual towns like Miami are deeply influencing the norm of the Spanish language.

This means that the norm of the Spanish language is being modified from its periphery and in bilingual situations. The paper examines the structure of Spanglish and proposes a specific theoretical model in order to explain how can Spanglish be a non-dominant dialect of the Spanish language no matter its normative influence on the performance of Spanish speakers is growing at the same time.