When Spanish meets English, new dialects emerge, giving us real-time insight into language evolution, linguists say.
For instance, "Vamos de punches punches punches", Yamilet Munoz texted her friends in Austin, Texas. It means "let's go and party", but it's not a phrase you'll find in any dictionary. It's a remix of Spanish and English words seasoned with an in-joke about punching the air as you dance.
"Our language has always been a very big indicator of our cultural pride," says Munoz, whose parents migrated from Mexico to San Antonio, Texas, in the 1990s. Around 66% of the city's population identify as Hispanic or Latino/Latina. For Munoz and her friends there is pride in speaking Spanish, but also in mixing the languages into the hybrid known as Spanglish.
The evolution of Spanglish has been documented for decades, with each generation adding its unique twist. Now a growing body of research, as well as the experiences of bilingual(双语的) speakers like Munoz, shows just how deeply English and Spanish are influencing each other in the United States, resulting in hybrid dialects like Spanglish, but also, transforming the underlying languages.
For the past decade, Carter and his colleagues have studied language change in Miami, a city where some 72% identify as Latino or Hispanic and which is strongly shaped by historical migration from Cuba. Their research documents the emergence of a distinct "Miami English" dialect as a result of that Spanish-language heritage.
The Spanish influence has also shown up in ways people may not immediately notice, such as sounds like the "oo" in "boot" being pronounced in a more Spanish-style way in Miami, more like the Spanish "u" vowel, according to separate research by Carter, Lydda Lopez Valdez at the University of Miami and Nandi Sims at Ohio State University.
"This is the work of language change, this is the work of dialect formation, this is how it happens. It happens in things that are really noticeable, like the phrase 'get down from the car', but it also happens in really slight ways," he says.
