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The proud ambition of the Real Academia Española, established in 1713, was to "fijar las voces y vocablos de la lengua castellana en su mayor propiedad, elegancia y pureza". Like its French counterpart, the Academia language police still attempts to repel boarders, in particular any English ones. But while the spread of Franglais is still limité and Denglish (a mixture of German and English) is still in its infancy, Spanglish is going from fuerza to fuerza.
Current Spanglish defies any tight definition. There’s simple "code switching", moving from one language to another (You’ve got a nasty mancha on your camiseta); adaption of an English word into a Spanish form (Quiero parquear el coche); translation of an English expression into Spanish using English syntax ("Te llamo para atrás" for "I’ll call you back"); and straight phonetic translation (children’s cold remedy Vick’s VaporRub becomes "bibaporú"). Some Spanglish words even have a completely separate meaning in Spanish (Voy a vacumear la carpeta).
On top of this are problems of regionality: Puerto Rican Spanglish is different from Nueva York Spanglish while different barrios within a city often use different dialect words.
One man trying to make sense of all this confusion is Ilan Stavans, professor of Spanish and creative writing at Amherst College, who has devoted the past years to compiling the world’s first Spanglish-English dictionary. A prolific commentator on Hispanic lifestyles and the editor of Hopscotch magazine, which concentrates on the relationships between Hispanic and other Western cultures, Ilan is a Mexican Jew whose first language was Yiddish followed by Spanish and then English.
"We’re at a point in history where we have not yet come to see Spanglish as a solid, fully-recognisable language," he says. "It’s still evolving and it’s a rapid transition but I’d define it now as a proper dialect that results from the clash of Spanish and English in a variety of...