Date:  Tue, 1 Apr 1997 13:13:20 -0600
From:  Dennis Baron <debaron[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UIUC.EDU>
Subject: Re: Spanglish,Codeswitching,or borrowed words

I haven't got them here, but last week there was an op-ed piece and two
letters in the NY Times on the question of Spanglish. You can probably
retrieve them from the NYTimes web site, which I believe is
www.nytimes.com.

Dennis

>    Yesterday, in my semantics course, we got into a big discussion about
>whether or not there is something we can call Spanglish? There were many
>examples of codeswitching and why people code switch and how they do it
>and then
>the discussion went to the idea of borrowed words such as pushale, leading
>to the comment that many young Amercan Spanish speakers were even trying
>to conjugate pusha in the Spanish forms. Also, the discussion led to the
>idea that many young Spanish speakers use constructions in spanish that
>are very unfamiliar to those who come from other countries. For example,
> a young person born in Guatemala and raised in the US will go
>back to Guatemala and are told that their Spaninsh has an accent o
>Gutemalams say that they don't understand their Spanish.
>    Next, I asked some young people I know.
>These university students that have been here or grwon up here and come
>from Spanish speaking households said they start to use the
>vocabulary of the people that come from the different spanish speaking
>countries when they are addressing them and so forth. So I believe that
>there is a dialect of Spanish that can be described as Spanglish. what
>are others findings on this?
>
>Ditra Henry
>Northeastern Illinois University
>Chicago

Dennis Baron                      debaron[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uiuc.edu 

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