What is Spanglish? Spanglish is plain and simply the mixing and blending of Spanish and English. This mixing and blending can serve the purposes of creating new Spanglish words, and those words to make varying Spanglish sentences.  There is no exact order of what language must come first and some examples include:

“Lets go ahorita.” (translation: “Lets go right now.”)

“Tomorrow vamos a la tienda.” (translation: “Tomorrow we’ll go to the store.”)

This Spanglish phenomenon is commonly used in the Latino community. There are no specific grammar or language rules that one must abide by. We’re “Spanglishizing” or “Englishizing” words and creating new ones that do not exist–and we’re using them constantly! For example:

“Parquea la troca” (translation: “park the truck”).

First of all, “parquea” is not a word . Secondly, the proper word is “estaciona”. Don’t get me started on “troca” either.

I’m not going to discuss whether Spanglish is helping or hurting our culture, I’ll save that for another post. It’s definitely a big part of Latino/Hispanic culture in the US and it merits recognition. What I will say right now is that people (not just Latinos) dish out Spanglish so nonchalantly not realizing some monolingual-Spanish speakers can’t understand what the hell they’re saying! That is the reason I’m blogging about this; to help myself and others become aware of this sometimes unhealthy and contagious habit!