The term Spanglish develops an intrinsic relationship with the presence of Spanish in the United States, mainly due to the immigration of people from Latin America. According to a report published by the US Census Bureau in 2010, there were 50.5 million Hispanics living in the country at the time (mostly in states like California, Arizona, Texas and Florida), so we could say that this number has probably grown in recent years; furthermore, the main countries that form this large population are, among others, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Cuba. The direct consequence of the increase in the Hispanic population is that the United States becomes the second country with the most Spaniards, after Mexico. Therefore, Hispanics encounter a huge conflict regarding language, known as language switching, or leaving Spanish in favor of English, which will provide them with more opportunities economically. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Spanglish is the concept that refers to the mixing of English and Spanish, defined as a phenomenon characteristic of Hispanics and the history of the Spanish language in the United States, consisting of code-switching and the use of words and phrases in both languages, as well as in the lending of translations. Spanglish is used by both native Spanish speakers and non-native Spanish speakers, which is why it is important to underline that, through all these years of immigration, it is possible to identify different linguistic generations. The first people to come to the United States were native Spanish speakers; then, the children of this generation grew up in a bilingual environment, having a perfect level in both languages, while subsequent generations have little knowledge of their mother tongue or don't even speak it, switching to English, as happened with the first generation, are only monolingual. Despite the progressive separation between generations according to their language, Spanglish appears as a Spanish dialect used in everyday communication and which maintains a link between Hispanics, to help them preserve that cultural heritage consisting of two completely different worlds and cultures. Therefore, Spanglish can be perceived as an intercultural language (which is produced at the borders between countries, in this case Mexico-USA), as a creole language (since children of the second generation are educated in this modality and learn it as their own native language). language) or as a pidgin language, because it arises from the need to communicate with other Hispanics in cases where there was a lexical gap and, to understand each other, they switched to English vocabulary, since it is the language that everyone, despite belonging to a different generation, you know. The main reason for the existence of Spanglish is everyday communication, but its development and importance did not end there, as we will explain later. However, Spanglish has been considered incorrect, seen as a corruption and not as a legitimate consequence of contact between two cultures, and is still stigmatized not only by the authors or by Hispanic society itself, as we will show later, but also by institutions that protect it. development and growth of the Spanish language such as the Real Academia Española, whose definition of this The concept introduced in the dictionary in 2012 was “Modalidad del habla de algunos grupos hispanos de los Estados Unidos, en la que se mezclan, deformándolos, elements léxicos y español and english grammars”. The feature that makes this definition offensive is the decision to include the verb 'deform', which demonstrates the bad perception towards this linguistic phenomenon. Criticisms were immediately raised against this explanationprotests; However, the introduction of this concept was the first step for Spanglish to be known and accepted and the RAE amended the previous definition in 2014 by simply removing the verb "deformar". In addition to this controversial episode, the language professor and former director of the Cervantes Institute in New York, Antonio Garrido Moraga, stated that the use of this hybrid language leads its speakers to the “ghetto”. Furthermore, both English and Spanish monolinguals, and even bilinguals, see this dialect as a mutation that only causes the deformation, as the RAE said, of these languages. This negative view of Spanglish is summarized in the article written by Ricardo Otheguy and Nancy Stern in 2011, “On the so-called Spanglish”, in which it is believed that this term is “a misleading term that sows confusion about the Spanish language and its speakers”. ”, arguing that Spanglish is produced only in an oral register and not in a written one. These views are based on a purist sense of the language, regardless of the social and cultural identity behind Spanglish. Spanglish speakers must be bilingual and bicultural, in order to manage the “two worlds”, so the belief that speakers are incapable of controlling only one of the languages ​​is completely false, as we can see in the testimony of Selena Barrientos: “ I understand Spanish fluently and I speak it well. But when I struggle to express a thought or idea, Spanglish is the best language to communicate it, both with my family, with friends, with teachers and even with strangers." Furthermore, Celia Zentella, who studies Spanglish from an anthropopolitical point of view, believes that the word “Spanglish” itself describes the oppression, but also the revolution of this phenomenon because its speakers have not given up on Spanish, although it has not the same status as English in the country. Zentella argues that people can't stop using this term, because “The words queer, black, Newyorican have all been embraced by those they describe and a sort of semantic inversion has occurred. The term Spanglish also has the potential to undergo the same change." However, from a linguistic point of view, Spanglish has barely been recognized or studied by linguists, being perceived as a forgotten phenomenon. Despite little research, some relevant features of Spanglish have been described. First of all, code-switching, which consists in the passage from one language to another and develops through two processes: intersentential code-switching, when the code is changed in separate sentences, and intrasentential code-switching, when it occurs within the same phrase. For example: Intersentential code-switching: Es amiga de mi hermano. I forgot his name. Intrasentential code-switching: I don't hear what the teacher explained yesterday in class. We also find code-mixing, which is different from the aforementioned switch because it is precisely the bending of the two languages ​​in a sentence. Another of the important characteristics, and on which many authors believe that the road to Spanglish has cultivated, even if the "invasion" of English into the Spanish spoken in other countries is usual, are loanwords, words taken from English and adapted to the morphological, phonetic and orthographic rules of the receiving language, while nonce borrowings are unstable, i.e. not adapted and used only at specific times. Some examples of borrowings are: troca > truck, yarda > yard, > mopear > to mop, suiche > switch. We can also find loan translations or calques, which are words or phrases translated literally word for word, such as llamar pa' trás (to recall), está p'arriba de ti (the choice is yours) or letra (letter > paper). Changes in gender and number (date > data) are also common,.