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Comment by alehlopeh | Hacker News Reader

It goes a lot deeper than this in Miami. A big chunk of suburban miami is populated by white Cuban exiles and their descendants. Growing up we spoke in Spanglish, which involves switching back and forth between English and Spanish, often multiple times within the same sentence. The switch between languages isn’t random, though. There are rules that govern which words you should say in which language, when to switch, etc. I’ve never heard anyone investigating how these rules work, but there are millions of Americans of Cuban descent in Miami for whom Spanglish is their true native language.

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What I find really interesting perhaps more than even Spanglish or this new dialect, is that back in 2006-2007 I did a lot of business trips to Miami and found it wild that many non-Spanish speakers (only English speakers) spoke English with a detectable Spanish accent. I think it makes perfect sense on reflection, but was eyebrow raising for me.

There was a video I saw of an American with a burger shop in Tokyo. He had adopted something of a vaguely Japanese-sounding accent. I think it just happens to some people

I’ve seen that one as well! Interesting video for sure. I was also surprised to hear him say he did not speak Japanese despite living there for 20 years and being married to a Japanese woman.

I've always wondered how that happens. Having lived in Japan for eight years my accent has become more neutral, but that's about it.

My sister, a Canadian, has lived in England a decade now. The locals can't hear it, but I can hear her accent and how she generally speaks has changed quite a bit.

She can hear it and knows it but can't help it at all.

I've lived in England all my life aside from several years in Wales and it's interesting how contrived the accent a lot of foreigners associate with us actually is. There's a lot of natural variation in our accents (they can change from town to town over the course of a dozen miles in extreme cases) but RP, 'posh English' or 'BBC English' was a product of 20th century radio broadcasting based on the natural accent of the south-eastern upper classes and somewhat controversially declared to be the standard pronunciation for British English.

The result of this is that a few of my friends and I have very similar sounding accents despite our families being from other ends of the country and having very different 'default' accents; it's entirely down to our respective mothers telling us to 'speak properly' every time we'd drop our Ts or show other 'common' habits of speech as kids!

Autism, ADHD, and various other neurodivergencies can all lead to people 'mirroring' those around them, including picking up others accents. As a notable personal example, my mom and I were recently talking about how I don't 'sound gay', which, while a stereotype, it is actually something I do, especially when around other gay men with the same affect. I pointed out that all my non-southern friends say the same thing about my southern accent, until they hear me talk on the phone with someone back home.

Though I notice it in myself very prominently, I think everyone is prone to this kind of mirroring behavior to some extent, and I could easily see someone living in a new region for a while developing a new accent that doesn't sound quite like the one they came to the region with.

Don't you think it's weird to instantly blame those disorders for someone assimilating to an accent?

Absolutely, which is why I was presenting it in the context of my experience as someone with those conditions. I don’t have a frame of reference otherwise, and if you read my last paragraph, you’ll notice I did concede that I think it’s something that happens in everyone and is more expressed in people with those conditions, which is a studied phenomenon.

Don’t you think it’s weird to ascribe hidden meanings to someone’s words?

I know someone with your conditions and they often start stories in the exact same way you did here, stories that might apply to like 80% of neurotypical people as well just like yours did. It just sounds a bit weird, and there’s no ascribing hidden meaning to someone’s words behind that.

Yup, it's wild that the pathology is so clearly obvious once people know to look for it, and yet we still have to have these conversations.

I'm getting from your reply here that you completely understood my original comment, meaning your comment to me asking about it was simply to provoke this conversation, not to actually talk about my point. Which is interesting, because I'm really interested (some may say eSPECIALy interested) in this topic, and would happily talk to you about it, had your original question been this message instead.

I'm also willing to concede that the autism diagnosis and acceptance is still really new for me, so I'm going through the phase of putting back together who I was and dealing with the fact that a lot of things that I've blamed myself for, for literally years, were simply because of this condition, and that some of my coping mechanisms have in fact been making me worse for a long time. It's weird to re-learn who you are as a person at 32 years old after having felt so sure of it for so long.

Which is what I think leads to these overly long explanations. I've been so misunderstood for so long that I'm literally afraid of it happening now.

I believe you’re mixing up two people here, since the comment you replied to here was the only one I made in this chain thus far.

What you describe in this comment is the exact same thing I’ve heard from my co-worker about this topic, however. She said it’s a relief to be able to attribute a lot of the things she has seemingly struggled with in the past to the new diagnoses she’s got.

Indeed I did, sorry for that, but I stand by the content of what I said.

I agree with your co-worker, it is a massive relief to know these issues aren't fundamental flaws of your character, but behaviors attributable to a condition that can be managed, accounted for, and worked around.

The burnout and stress you feel before diagnosis/acceptance is intense, and, for some of us, debilitating. I have been remarkably fortunate to have a job with co-workers who have enough compassion and understanding to let me be honest about how I'm feeling, and understanding that what I feel is valid, though not always correct or in alignment with my logical thoughts. It's been complicated and involved a lot of boundary setting and apologies when I still fail, but that's all gotten easier since I just _know why_.

It’s not weird. The first sentence explains it.

When English is spoken by Lithuanians I've noticed an unusual Americanish accent that can sometimes be quite strong. Naturally it makes sense and TV, Films and other media sources are a key teacher for English outside of schooling. But it is a little odd to be around basket-ball playing, American accented Lithuanians.

Certainly a similar situation. Where English spoke in your environment (in your example likely in the home by immigrant parents and grandparents where English is not their first language) you would develop the pronunciations used by those around you.

The Cajun accent of Louisiana sounds a lot to me like southern American English as spoken by a French speaker, which historically is its origin.

I live in the south and admittedly have a “detectable” southern accent. To me that Cajun accent is really unlike every other southern accent, so I guess I focus more on the French-ish aspect of it because I don’t really hear the southern in it.

I can distinguish the differences between many southern accents, to the point where I could pinpoint a speaker with roots in Georgia/Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, SC, NC, Texas, etc with pretty good accuracy. Others not from the south would tend to lump a lot of them together as a “southern” accent where I see lots of differences and distinctions. Cadence and “y’all” is sometimes the only real commonality among the region.

There's a less widespread but similar phenomenon with the older generation of Polish immigrants in Chicago, who use Polish grammar but an almost entirely English lexicon. I've met a few people who I straight up couldn't understand, and I'm bilingual in the two languages they fused together.

Is that at all influenced by regional differences in the Poles that came to Chicago? I grew up with a lot of first-gen highlander Polish-Americans (in the Chicago suburbs). They apparently have some differences with earlier important groups, eg, my family friends who pronounce grandmother "Busia".

I'm a Belarusian, and Busia totally makes sense to me (as a simplification of babusia/babula), even though I probably wouldn't use it myself.

"important" should be "immigrant" here

Highlanders have their own dialect, but it's intelligible the same way Londoners can understand Scots. What happens after long exposure to Chicago is that half the lexicon gets swapped out with English words pronounced with Polish phonetics. Those people in their youth spoke very easily understandable Polish, but what they speak today makes sense only to them.

Highlanders = górale ?

I think so? Google suggests that's what I mean? In English - the only language I know - they always said Highlanders. The only other distinguishing piece of information I have is that this was a common car window sticker: https://i.etsystatic.com/16056651/r/il/a2f7e1/2469515581/il_...

Interesting, have never noticed my second-gen Polish friends mention this but they're also from the city not the suburbs

I grew up in Chicago in the late 80's and observed it in the older generation then; it might not hold for the next generation of immigrants like me.

I have some distant family in the Chicago metro area like this, even my own parents professed to not having a clue what great uncle Tomasz was saying most of the time.

> who use Polish grammar but an almost entirely English lexicon. I've met a few people who I straight up couldn't understand

I caused a similar confusion with my phone. When I switch my phone from English to my native language I don't understand the menus anymore, and the translations sound ridiculous.

> The switch between languages isn’t random, though

We kind of do this already in mainline English, switching between Germanic, French, Latin and Greek based on some unwritten rules. Adding Spanish wouldn’t really change things that much considering its close relatives French and Latin are already so well represented. Though I’m sure the Spanish part is more dominant in this dialect than it would be eventually in the broader language.

Spanglish is not necessarily using English words in Spanish or vice/versa.

It's using "troca" ("trucka"?) instead of "camioneta" when referring to "truck".

Another example is "parkear" instead of "estacionar" when referring to "parking".

This is in the case of the Mexican dialect of Spanglish.

It's extremely common in every situation like this, the grammar of the original language stays but the lexicon (nouns especially) gets rapidly switched out with borrowings and calques from the surrounding language.

Oh interesting. Japanese is like this. Many years ago it absorbed Chinese nouns, but more recently it has absorbed many English nouns.

Some Americans learning Japanese will regret this last part- wishing that the language stayed “pure”, as if it were ever actually pure, whatever that means.

> Japanese is like this.

Every language is like this.

Except Icelandic.

Oh, even Icelandic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvítis_fokking_fokk

Different languages embrace this to different degrees.

With modern French the interesting one trying to fight this sort of natural evolution by defering a lot of language changes to their Academy and intentionally replacing calques and borrowings with "corrected" versions. Their Academy isn't always successful in getting French speakers to conform to their "corrected" words, but it is fascinating that they still try.

Similar happens in Spanish, I think just the attempt is valuable in and of itself, if for no other purpose that asking the question, "can we do better?". Otherwise one ends with English and its lowest-common denominator antics

Japanese is fascinating because they have an different alphabet symbolism for imported words. It has the same phonetics as native Japanese, but the written language distinguishes the origin.

This is actually not entirely correct.

Japanese has three forms of writing: Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana.

Kanji, which stands for "Han Language/Characters", was imported from China; "Kan" is the Japanese reading of "Han". It's used more or less as when it was imported and is largely interchangable with Traditional Chinese.

Hiragana originated as a simplification of cursive Kanji, because people both today and from a few millenia ago find Kanji too complicated to deal with at times. Its name means "Simplified Kana", in contrast to Kanji.

Hiragana is used to accent Kanji and connect sentences together for better flow and comprehension (known as Okurigana), can be used by itself (sometimes in place of Kanji, especially for childrens writing), and is sometimes used to convey an image of cuteness ("kawaii") and femininity due to its curvy styling. Pronunciation guides for Kanji (known as Furigana), if present, are also written with Hiragana.

Katakana similarly originated as a simplification of Kanji, though its styling is more straight than Hiragana to enable easier writing with instruments besides brushes or pens on paper (eg: engraving in wood or stone). Its name means "Partial Kana", signifying that it's derived from the parts of Kanji characters.

Katakana is used today to write foreign words, scientific names (including Japanese ones), and certain Japanese names such as those of businesses. It's also used to give emphasis, like how bold or italic styling or all caps is used in English. In times past, Katakana was also used instead of Hiragana to accent and connect sentences.

Both Hiragana and Katakana have respective characters in their alphabets and phonetically can be interchanged character for character.

The common modern day understanding that Katakana "is for foreign words" is merely just one of its use cases.

>In times past, Katakana was also used instead of Hiragana to accent and connect sentences.

Such as in the printed copy of Emperor Hirohito's speech announcing the surrender of Japan in 1945 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ImperialSurrenderRescript...

> wishing that the language stayed “pure”, as if it were ever actually pure, whatever that

I have wished for consistency in every language I have ever learned or tried to learn, which I suspect is what "pure" would mean in this context. Imported words often use different roots and conjugate inconsistently, which makes it harder to remember and use them. (Though of course, as sibling comments point out, any living language will import from other languages; the only escape is in conlangs... but if you actually used those they'd get the same difficulty:])

In Israel a Briefcase was referred to as a James Bond.

parqueo and parquear are used widely in Central and South America so I am not sure it's fair to call them Spanglish.

Provided the term is meant to apply to the Spanish spoken by immigrants and/or border area residents in the US.

Parcheggio and parcheggiare are used in Italian too, I'm pretty sure they're not derived from English, but from "parco" (park), which has Indo-European roots.

In Spain at least there is a difference between estacionar (to stop with the engine running) and aparcar (to stop and leave). In Mexico the two things are more or less merged, and if you say estacionar or parquear depends on how much English influence there is on your idiolect... Or how close to the border you are o/~ y sus troconas del año, que afuera tenian parqueadas o/~

Actually "aparcar" and "estacionar" are synonyms (at least in Spain, but I think also in latin America [0])

Maybe you meant "parar" or "detener" (to stop), that don't clarify by them self if the engine has to be stopped or not (usually is the whole sentence what clarifies that)

[0]: https://www.fundeu.es/recomendacion/aparcarestacionarparquea...

You don't switch between Greek and French while speaking English.

The doctor performed the Hippocratic Oath on the terrace.

Imported vocabulary is not code switching.

Is this gatekeeping?

What's the difference?

Code-switching (linguistically) requires the speaker to be multilingual and it describes the process and patterns used to determine when words are spoken in one language versus the other.

Imported vocabulary/borrowed words simply describes loanwords that make it into the common lexicon of speakers of the receiving language but not necessarily speakers of the donor language.

You're missing the point of how the vocabulary got imported. It was thanks to code switching.

I don’t disagree with the idea that code-switchers introduce new vocabulary to the general public at all, in fact, the two terms describe a word or phrase at different phases of its journey to integration within a language. In other words, there exists a point in the history of the language or dialect, the use of word or phrase ceases to be code-switching and becomes widely accepted as imported vocabulary.

There is a distinction, however, that not all words that are used via code-switching are going to become part of common enough vernacular that it would become accepted within a language, and likewise, there may be cases where loanwords do not enter a language via speakers that code-switch it into their daily vocabulary.

I think a good analogy is imported cheese. It's still Italian cheese even if you grew up with mozzarella as an American and consider pizza an American food. So while these words might be completely familiar to an English speaker you are still using a foreign word and are speaking and understand a very tiny bit of a foreign language. I know a tiny bit of German thanks to kindergarten. A word my Austrian friend spoke in a German sentence this morning while speaking with his son. My very tiny set of German vocabulary along with the context made it easy enough to figure out where they are headed today.

I feel like German shouldn't count. The relatedness of these two languages is such that there are so many cognates and similar grammar, you could probably understand a lot of German sentences just by listening closely and being curious.

But kindergarten is imported the whole world over. You can't say you know German based on that. Code-switchers understand the grammar of both languages, not just a few words.

I do think the Normans entering England, or Germanic peoples mixing with Celts, or Celts being conquered by Romans for a brief time -- all of that probably produced code switchers in their moment in time, with lasting impact to our vocabular and grammar. But it's not code switching anymore. It's modern English now.

Similar things happened in Spain with Celts, Romans, Arabs, Goths, Basques... Not to mention all the regional Romance languages that survive today (Galician, Catalan). They conquered the Americas and got some infusion of that vocabulary too. Castilian borrows vocabulary from all of these. But monolingual Castilian speakers do not "code switch".

I hear German often enough and understand almost nothing.

You also know a little bit of Indian language you yogurt guru.

You don't have to be aware you're using words from other languages to be speaking words from other languages.

Adiós amigo.

Borrowed words is a totally different phenomenon.

Can you explain the difference? They look identical to me.

I don't necessarily agree with everyone above, but..

When the first person used "hotel" in an English sentence, they were struggling to find a suitable word and failed, and fell back to another language for it. Or possibly they thought it was a better word than the English equivalent for some reason. They thought of it as a French word, with all the implications of it in French, rather than English.

When I use "hotel" in a sentence, it's just part of the language I grew up with. To me, it's an English word, not something I fell back on in another language.

That said, the "Spanglish" referenced here is being learned from birth by people, so they aren't context switching either. They're just speaking how they learned to speak. Older people are probably still context switching, but younger people likely aren't.

The fact that's it's an English word to you doesn't make it no longer a French word. You simply aren't aware you're using a French word.

Code switching is when you're speaking language X, then switch over to language Y for one or more words. If there's another person present who knows X but doesn't know Y, they'll probably be lost when you do that.

Borrowing might have started out as code switching, or something else, but when you use words borrowed a long time ago from Y in language X, people who know X but not necessarily Y will probably understand you. There are of course technical terms that you might use which not everyone will understand. Some of these will have been borrowed from another language, like electron or perigee or perihelion, while others might be words made up and not borrowed, like quark or boson or fermion. The fact that some were borrowed, and others not, does not make the one code switching and the other something else.

And if you're code switching, you'll probably be pronouncing the words from language Y with the expected pronunciation of Y, whereas if you're using words borrowed from Y into X, they will probably be pronounced differently from how they would be pronounced if you were code switching into Y (or just speaking Y), and the semantics may have changed. Take the word 'mesa' in English, describing a flat-topped hill in the southwest. If you're a non-Spanish speaker, you'll probably pronounce that last vowel as a schwa, and only have the flat-topped hill meaning in mind. Whereas if you code switched into Spanish, that last vowel would probably sound like the /a/ in 'father', and you might be talking about a table.

My point could have been clearer but it was essentially that imported words started out as code switching. The fact that someone mimicking a code switcher doesn't understand French doesn't make hotel no longer a French word.

you don't, but there is an element of code-switching that goes on in English. given that French, Greek and Latin-origin words in English tend to have come down from the clergy or the aristocracy, there is a subconscious subtext of power and education - and on the flipside pretense and elitism - that can be given off with particular use or lack of use of those words. some people do this naturally and some people affect it - Boris Johnson is well-known for it - but, while not quite the same as switching between Spanish and English - it is a thing that occurs

“I gotta say, this kid really thinks he’s the alpha and the omega du jour”.

I think a lot of English speakers would not know what that phrase would mean.

"Alpha and Omega" as used in English is a biblical reference, does not really have much to do with practical knowledge of Greek.

Du jour would be understood on a restaurant menu for soup more than anything else.

i understood it just fine

Not me. It read to me as the kind of pretentious garble spoken by someone who doesn't know the meaning of the words they're uttering, and perhaps doesn't even know what thought they're trying to communicate.

Yeah, kiwi here and I have no idea what "the omega du jour" means.

"The omega du jour" means nothing. You're parsing the sentence wrong.

The alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. It's the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, and a Biblical reference to the Almighty. And then du jour means "of the day".

The fact that they parsed it as "omega du jour" makes me think even more that it's not typical speech.

When you say the word "energy" or "hotel" you are switching to French. After a few centuries of this you don't notice and consider it common English.

You're not "switching to French", you're saying a word in English which happens to have a French root.

That's wrong. These words came directly from servents using the words of their Normandy ruling class in England. They are French words. The fact that you can no longer perceive that is my entire point.

Exactly (although I would have used the word "etymology" rather than "root", which means s.t. else to a linguist). The fact that a word might have been borrowed into English nearly a thousand years ago does not mean that you're speaking French when you use it, any more than the fact that you might have had a French ancestor a thousand years ago makes you French.

Genetically you are French if your ancestors are French. A word can be French and used in English as a common word. You're still saying a French word no matter how familiar it has become to you. Your claim seems to be that after an exact number of years of being used by English speakers a word is no longer French. Which doesn't hold up when you try to assign that exact number. Au revoir.

Nah there isn't an "identity function" for words like that, nor can a single language "claim" a word. When a language fully assimilates a word with its origin in another language, it also becomes fully a word in the assimilating language as well. The connotation, denotation, pronunciation, and/or orthography can each change, or not, in either language or both, and it is a different word from that point on regardless.

Your point about "genetically french" is also wrong in almost exactly the same way so it provides an illustrative comparison. There's no single french ethnicity, just people who are french and some observable trends. Someone is french who has french citizenship, a word is english when it is widely spoken by native english speakers.

I also need to point out that this is not a matter of opinion. Linguistics is an established field and consensus is clear on this. You are confidently asserting things that are well outside the mainstream of the science.

No language is claiming the word. English uses German words. When my Austrian friend spoke German to his son this morning I understood the word kindergarten because I have a small German vocabulary like all English speakers do. Kindergarten is simply a German word that English speakers understand.

There are absolutely genetic groupings of people. Any geneticist will tell you so. You can learn more here. https://medium.com/nautilus-magazine/what-both-the-left-and-...

Adiós amigo.

When English people in the 13th century spoke the word hotel they might be code switching between English and Old French (but that's debatable because it seems this word ultimately has a Latin root)

However this word is part of the English lexicon today and require no knowledge of French, and as such isn't an example of code switching

In order to use and understand the word kindergarten I need to understand and speak at least one German word. That's knowledge of German, even if it's a tiny bit of knowledge. The fact that some English speakers aren't aware of their knowledge of German doesn't make kindergarten no longer a German word.

> You don't switch between Greek and French while speaking English.

Challenge accepted: "The stoic young man bid us au revoir and left"

The thing is, English borrows so much from other languages that it's not apparent to English speakers that the words are from other languages.

...

et cetera (etc)

id est (i.e.)

videlicet (viz)

sic

and that's just Latin.

Think about Schadenfreud, Bon appétit, Au revoir, Macho, Amigo, Kindergarten, Uber, Gesundheit, Smorgasbord, Apartheid, Trek...

Honestly, the list goes on and on and on. English speakers use more "borrowed" phrases and words than any other language I can think of.

Yeah this is an interesting one. We don't really have a good English equivalent for "guten apetit" or "dobrou chuť" but bon appétit feels like the most well-known loan phrase that could stand in. "Enjoy your meal" appears to be sort of popular in restaurants (i.e. the server will say it to you) but it sounds so cold and weird to me. I really wish we just leaned into bon appétit instead.

I think "bon appétit" has more of a "tuck in" flavour than "Enjoy your meal".

I think the point of the parent comment is that, although English is full of borrowed words and phrases, you're not switching to speaking French/German/Latin while saying them. You're still speaking English, it's just a subset of English which was borrowed from somewhere.

You can define it that way, and sure, there's a certain difference when we borrow phrase bits from languages we don't actually understand and use them as an expression (inter alia, et cetera) and when we do. But the latter also happens when bilingualism is common.

I won't actually consider these wholesale expression borrowings part of English until they spread to English speakers who don't speak the borrowed language.

The people who originally used these words were switching. It only became accepted by English speakers much later.

I'm bilingual in English and German, but when I use "Kindergarten" or "Uber" in an English sentence, that's still English, while when I use "Sorry" in a German sentence, that's still German.

It's really noticeable for me because when speaking English I've subconsciously adopted a British accent, but when using English loan words in German I'll automatically pronounce them in a very German way.

I notice this as well working with my Dutch colleagues as an American. They’ll be discussing some bit of code and all of a sudden need to reference a programming concept or a class name that is English in origin and they will use their own accent. If I then come back to talk to them later about the same thing, it will have a different accent when we are speaking English together.

Words are assimilated to greater or lesser degrees. I'd say that au revoir is now English, as I'd expect any competent English speaker to understand it, but it's still commonly written in italics and pronounced in a noticeably French accent. Meanwhile, café is fully anglicised and not really registered as foreign at all, but that pesky accent remains in the written form, giving a clue to its soupçon of French (the truly English form of the word is probably caff).

> Meanwhile, café is fully anglicised

Oh, I'm not sure about that. I say "Kaffay", that is I anglicise the French pronunciation, even though I have a reasonable French accent. But many English people pronounce it as "Kaff".

> or "Uber" in an English sentence, that's still English

That should be "Über", really, shouldn't it?

I don't know, I've never used the service, but the vowel-sound "Ü" doesn't occur in native English. I guess most people just say "Oober" and be done with it. To me, "Über" looks like a foreign word, not an import. In English, I think it's used only as a brand-name, and as part of the word "Übermensch", a term associated with a particular philosophy book.

So there's three pronunciations I'd use.

In German, the german word "über": [ˈyːbɐ]

In German, the company "Uber": ['uːbə]

In English, the company "Uber": [ˈjuːbə]

But at one time Kindergarten was code switching and was still firmly German. It only became common English after first being used as a German word dropped into English sentences. It still remains a German word no matter how familiar that German word is to English speakers.

> The thing is, English borrows so much from other languages that it's not apparent to English speakers that the words are from other languages.

As made famous by "the trouble with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur", attributed to GWB.

I had a conversation with a colleague last week, he's a native French speaker, I'm a native German speaker. We switched between French, German and English, every time we had a problem expressing what we wanted to say in a language and then continuing the conversation a little in another language before switching again. That's a form of code-switching.

What you do is using phrases and words that you learned without speaking the language they're borrowed from. Sometimes borrowing words even limits the meaning, when you say "Gesundheit" you don't mean the general concept of health, you mean "bless you". If I asked you to translate et cetera you would probably not be able to unless you spoke Latin.

Au contraire - it's practically a Deus ex machina that this discussion should allow such an elegant counterexample.

Edit: That was such an eureka moment I feel like it should be something of a cliché.

QED (Quod erat demonstrandum)

I don't think you're referring to anything remotely approaching bilingual speech. Educated English speakers might use "a priori" or "in vino veritas" or some word in French here in there, but those are tiny changes compared to how spanglish is spoken in Florida and other parts.

Sounds like a standard Creole language. I know that phenomena related to merging languages of populations in contact are well studied, but don't know enough to link to any relevant lit. sorry.

I think Creole is different, in the sense that there is emergent grammar as well. While spanglish uses a combination of English & Spanish grammar, and is more close to a mixed language

EDIT: This comment has significant inaccuracies.

Creole languages are more about "20 people speaking 20 different languages create a new common merged language", spanglish sound more like "20k bilinguals with varying preference between the 2 languages mix and match the 2 languages for convenience".

This assuming that most spanglish speakers could hold a conversation in either languages.

> "20 people speaking 20 different languages create a new common merged language"

If you can provide an example of such a diverse set of languages becoming a new language, that would be interesting.

Creole has nothing to do with the number of languages. Creole is what you get when two groups of people with no bilingual speakers are forced to interact and develop a new language. Normally, it starts as a pidgin to facilitate trade but then develops into a full fledged language. The main difference with Spanglish being that the speakers often know both languages to a modest degree but probably would not be considered native by other native speakers. Also, there are almost 1M Dominicans alone in NYC. 20k makes it sound like some cute phenomena happening in Little Havana in Miami.

> Creole has nothing to do with the number of languages.

I agree, I was misremembering. After a quick refresher I agree that spanglish fits the Creole definition much better than I initially considered.

> there are almost 1M Dominicans alone in NYC

Not all 1M people interact with each other, I was talking about the overlapping sets of social circles areound people, not the total count.

I hate to use Wikipedia as an authority but:

Spanglish is not a creole or dialect of Spanish because, though people claim they are native Spanglish speakers, Spanglish itself is not a language on its own, but speakers speak English or Spanish with a heavy influence from the other language. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanglish)

I agree, but here I was talking about the creation of the language, my opinion was that a language started like spanglish could not be a creole.

As the term "creole" is used in linguistics, it means a language that: a) started as a contact language, and b) has become the mother tongue of a group. So, I think you might be right, because Spanglish originated as a speech among English-Spanish bilinguals rather than as a contact language between English and Spanish communities. If Spanglish became the mother tongue of a group who couldn't speak Spanish or English, then, well...I'm not sure.

I had no intentions to opine on b) but according to alehlopeh a few levels up [0] it might be true

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383907

> If you can provide an example of such a diverse set of languages becoming a new language, that would be interesting.

It's certainly not 20 languages, but Singlish (Singapore creole) has a number of influences.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlish

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tok_Pisin

> There are rules that govern which words you should say in which language, when to switch, etc. I’ve never heard anyone investigating how these rules work,

That phenomenon in general is well studied: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching

Code-switching is not the same as 'Spanglish', 'Hinglish', etc. - the latter could be something you code-switch to with certain people (young peers say).

GP means rules, a grammar of sorts, for which words are English and which words are Spanish in the same sentence. Switching without pause, talking to the same person in the same setting.

I think "translanguaging" might be the better place to start reading about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translanguaging

The linked article is exactly what you’re describing. It’s linguistic code switching and covers Spanglish. It predates the more modern, broader use of the term, like having a work accent and home accent.

Like Surzhyk in Ukraine! Mixed Ukrainian/Russian that is the true mother tongue for many Ukrainians!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surzhyk

Not quite, English and Spanish are just too dissimilar. Surzhyk is like Portuñol and it's different in different places

https://multilingual.com/articles/portunol-blending-spanish-...

Interesting!

Post-Norman-invasion English more-or-less came from a such a hybrid that switched multiple times per sentence between bastardised French and older English.

Isn't it more like Old Norse and Old English, re: the number of basic English words that come from Old Norse[0]? The Norman influence appears to largely influence abstract domains like law, governance, and academia with the exception of the well-known culinary distinctions.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Old_N...

At its largest extent the Danelaw covered only about half of england, and it lasted around a century before the Kingdom of Wessex conquered first the other remaining Anglo-saxon kingdoms, then retook the Danelaw, and created a unified Kingdom of England.

No, the Norse influence is small relative to Norman. Something like 30% of modern English is Norman-French derived, with thousands of direct cognates.

History is rarely simple though! The Normans themselves were a hybrid of Viking settlers and locals. So it's likely that quite a few of those French words we absorbed into English have Old Norse roots.

There’s plenty of old Norse in use for places in Yorkshire.

The dialect has words too such as, “ta” (thanks). It’s similar to the Danish word, “tak”.

Do you have any guesses as to the contours of the rules followed? Maybe family v. friend v. work usage, or such?

I've lived most my life in very multi-lingual cities and neighborhoods, and it always struck me how some English very expressive short phrases, eg. "Like, no way", were used in other language conversations. Always thought, it was the relative brevity and ubiquity, in the way "C'est la vie" was for awhile in English.

Watching international versions of Taskmaster - originally a British show, which has now been done in many countries in Europe and elsewhere- it's always been amusing to hear random English phrases get blurted out.

Brevity of phrase is part of it, but it doesn't seem to happen in conversational tones- usually either when someone is showing off or as an interjection of sorts.

What's your favorite versions? I've watched the UK and NZ ones (and I know the US one isn't worth it), but I haven't gotten into the non-English ones yet.

Other than those two, the Australian and Norweigan (Kongen Befaller) are great, though early on in Norway's seasons there'll be a fair number of repeat tasks from the UK version. Same for Denmark (Stormester), perhaps more so.

Portugal's is pretty decent, though the format runs two hours per episode. I also thought the Croation version (Direktor Svemira) was decent, though the individual cast members lean hard into their own stereotypes (Lidija as the personification of the male gaze, for example).

Sweden's is really popular, but I personally didn't care for it at all.

As with the US version, it's probably best to pretend that Spain and Belgium's didn't happen.

Thanks! I did not even realize there were so many! I imagine it's a popular format due to how well it can go for comparatively little budget and planning.

I'll have to track those down. Two hours per episode for Portugal's sounds _wild_, I'm interested to see how that goes.

The Norwegian version has the Ylvis brothers and many from that circle of comedians.

One thing I love about the New Zealand one is the occasional bits of te reo Māori that get used. I know that the cultural context is very different, but the affect is similar to Ireland: most people are not truly bilingual, but almost everyone knows some of the language, and dropping a few words or phrases into your English is quite normal. Just as I might end a story with sin é (lit. translation: "that's it").

Yes, whenua and pākehā are just a few examples of the Māori words that are now frequently used in the daily speech in New Zealand.

> the rules followed? Maybe family v. friend v. work usage, or such?

Given that the phenomenon happens in all languages, especially where linguistic regions meet, you would find usage influenced by

   * brevity of pronunciation (e.g. “chic”, “déjà-vu”)
   * preference for local coinage and accent
   * dominant regional usage (e.g. computer and automotive terminology)
   * *prestige* (e.g. historical EN borrowings from FR, especially for food; computer terminology;  “je ne sais quoi”)
   * humour, sarcasm (e.g. in Quebec, the term *bloke* is used by FR speakers to refer to EN speakers)

>I’ve never heard anyone investigating how these rules work,

There are studies of this. It's best to search in Google scholar to filter out (some of) the crap:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Miam...

The majority of the work focuses on sociolinguistic aspects of Spanglish, but there are also grammatical investigations. Here's an example dissertation that cites some other studies along the same lines:

https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

This is called a creole (or actually perhaps in this case a mixed language is a more accurate description - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_language)

I grew up with French and Kabyle [1] and to this day we speak a mixture of both. And it comes very naturally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabyle_language

My favorite Algerian loanword is "mickeyettes" for "cartoons" which comes from Mickey Mouse.

That's called code-switching

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching

> In linguistics, code-switching or language alternation occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation or situation. Code-switching is different from plurilingualism in that plurilingualism refers to the ability of an individual to use multiple languages,[1] while code-switching is the act of using multiple languages together.

The whole rest of the article is the result of linguists studying it.

That is an entirely different phenomenon.

OK, what makes it different?

Hmm, looking further. It seems the linguistic phenomenon of code-switching is one accurate name for this, but there's also a sociological phenomenon of code-switching that is related but very different - intentional shifting based on social context or group that you're addressing.

Elsewhere in this same thread, someone was assuming the sociological cause for Spanglish, instead of the more organic linguistic cause that happens anywhere you have two cultures and languages in close contact. I suspect this blurred definition makes talking about this more complicated now, since sociological code-switching has become part of America's racialized sociology discussion.

If I had my druthers I'd split those two very different phenomena into separate terms, because they don't even produce the same kinds of linguistic patterns.

(Thanks for asking me to justify, my assumption was quite wrong regarding the scope of the term.)

> intentional shifting based on social context or group that you're addressing.

Isn't that register-switching?

It gets confusing in English, because the classier registers in English involves the use of more words of French, Latin or Greek origin, the less-classy registers rely more on anglo-saxon words.

Sounds similar to the "frenglish" that is often heard in Montreal.

I like that english idioms translated literally make sense in Québec, such as "ça fait du sens" for "it makes sense".

I realized this specific one is a bit controversial while searching for it, here is something I found on the website of the Government of Canada about it: https://www.noslangues-ourlanguages.gc.ca/fr/chroniques-de-l...

Based on the fact that some analysis of this appeared in my undergrad Spanish courses I feel confident saying that there must be a good amount of academic literature exploring these and many other topics with Spanglish.

Ye I was just thinking this new dialect sounds like Spanglish transliterated into English.

Need to clarify the difference between "pidgin" and "creole" here. A pidgin is a (relatively simple) language that develops for communication between two or more speech communities. A pidgin is considered to have become a creole when it has become the mother tongue of a new generation of children.

I don't think the blended languages like Spanglish and Hinglish are considered pidgins or creoles within linguistics, but I could see room for argument on that.

I struggle to imagine how this could be a controversial issue. It is just a clarification of the terminology used in linguistics, not a judgement of anyone's culture.

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