Wednesday October 31, 2007
Spanglish and Nuyoricanspeak
By GRANT BARRETT
EARLIER this year, I was delighted when sheetrockero came up in my word-hunting. A sheetrockero, I discovered, is somebody who puts drywall or sheetrock on the wooden frames of new buildings. It’s straightforward Spanglish: the English sheetrock plus the Spanish -ero suffix, indicating a person who undertakes a task or profession.
Research uncovered a good dozen books on Amazon.com featuring similar “construction Spanish”. Even more pleasing was that one of them, Terry Eddy’s and Alberto Herrera’s Learning Construction Spanglish, includes a conjugation chart for shiroquear, a Spanglish verb for “to sheetrock (shiroque); to hang drywall”.
But a couple of weeks later, in the National Review I read something that made me wonder. The writer, Jay Nordinger, was concerned about “construction Spanish” and bilingualism and the “Spanish-preservation rackets”. It didn’t sound good. I wondered if I should be worried, too. Is delighting in the words sheetrockero and shiroquear akin to standing on the deck of the Titanic and saying, “Ooh! Pretty iceberg!”?
Most Americans seem to understand some Spanish. Hasta la vista. See you later. Adios. Goodbye. Gracias. Thank you. Sí. Yes. In at least that way, Spanish certainly has made a place in the United States, as Nordinger wrote.
There are even some Spanish words that are so far into American English that many speakers don’t realise their origins, especially in slang, where language is often transmitted orally and is altered long before it reaches paper.
Kahunas, for example, is a long-standing corruption of cojones, meaning “testicles”, and is used in almost the same way, although since its language conversion, it’s become confused with the Hawaiian kahuna, which means a big or important man or thing. “You’ve got some big kahunas talking to me like that,” you might say.
Another slang term that has been disguised in its new home is chones, which means underpants or panties. In its place in English slang, the spelling varies – choners and chonies are two common variants – but its origins in Mexican Spanish are evident with even the slightest research.
But it’s not a one-way street. In looking at my data, I could see that English-speakers and Spanish-speakers are giving words to each other at the same time. The encounter is changing Spanish, too.
For example, in Chicago, New York City, and elsewhere, Mexicans and Central Americans have been trained by skilled Japanese sushi chefs. They are called susheros, a new word in both languages, and some of them now run their own sushi restaurants.
In the Rio Grande valley, chansa means and comes from “chance”, as in dale chansa, “give him a chance”. Elsewhere in the state, some Spanish-speakers call Texas Rangers Rinches, which, in the right context, is unkind.
In California, Hispanophones seem to have borrowed the American derogatory term “wetback”, referring to an illegal immigrant, abbreviated it to wab, and applied it to new Spanish-speaking immigrants who seem like rubes or rustics.
This sort of borrowing is not new, either. By 1961 in Miami, “wash” had already become juashanga and meant laundromat, and although Spanglish varies around the country, the verb watchar is common to many regions.
These are just a few examples of how English influences the language of Spanish-speakers. The influence, however, is felt even stronger over generations.
A couple of summers ago a Puerto Rican mother wrote to me in response to a query that, yes, she was born in Puerto Rico and her sons considered themselves Puerto Rican, even though they grew up in New York.
But, she wrote, they hardly spoke proper Puerto Rican Spanish. She expressed no hope that her first grandchild – less than a year old – would speak any Spanish at all. At least, not real Spanish, she lamented. The language they spoke was not Puertorro or Boriquen – Puerto Rican. The change goes so far that even if her sons say they are Boriqua, it sometimes sounds like and is sometimes written as Bodiqua. Nueva York often comes out as Nueva Yol.
That’s what I see here in New York City, too. Even where Spanish shows up in the mouths of Anglophones in the form of the ubiquitous icy treat coquito and in the names of corner stores, which are often called bodegas, Nuyoricans speak a variety of Spanish littered with English words and syntax.
My colleagues tell me this happens in Spanish-speaking families all across the country: by the third generation, Spanish is usually a heritage more than it is a language.
Jay Nordinger has a point. It is irrefutable that the language is changing. So my new question to research is: Who will guard the language of Cervantes from the language of Shakespeare? And will they send me newly borrowed words when they find them?
* Grant Barrett is currently part of teams editing dictionary matter for Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Thomson Heinle. He is co-host of the language radio show A Way with Words, http://www.waywordradio.org, and editor of the Double-Tongued Dictionary, http://www.doubletongued.org.
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