Spanglish - Examples

Examples

Spanish and English have mixed quite a bit. For example, a fluent bilingual speaker addressing another, like bilingual speaker might engage in code switching with the sentence: I'm sorry I cannot attend next week's meeting porque tengo una obligación de negocios en Boston, pero espero que I'll be back for the meeting the week after. Changing some words to English, for example, "Te veo ahorita, me voy de shopping para el mall": "See you later, I'm going shopping in the mall". Spanglish is mostly spoken this way.

Spanglish phrases often use shorter words from both languages as in: "Me voy a wake up". (Rather than: "Me voy a levantar" or "I am going to wake up.") A common code switch in Puerto Rican Spanglish is using the English word "so" (therefore): "Tengo clase, so me voy" ("I have a class, so I'm leaving"), rather than the Spanish "porque" with different order ("me voy porque tengo clase").

Word borrowings from English to Spanish are more common, using false cognates in their English senses, or calquing idiomatic English expressions. Some examples:

• The non-standard word afianza is used in Spanglish in preference to the standard Spanish seguro ("insurance policy").
• The word carpeta is "folder" in standard Spanish. In some Spanglishes it means "carpet" instead of Spanish 'alfombra'.
• The word clutch (pronounced: "cloch") is Spanglish, Mexican Spanish and Latin American Spanish for the gear-shifting device of an automotive transmission. The standard Spanish word is embrague.
• In Spanglish, yonque denotes "junkyard", not the standard Spanish deshuesadero.
• In Spanglish, word boiler is both "water heater" and "boiler". The standard Spanish words are calentador de agua (water heater) and hervidor or "caldera" (boiler).
• The Spanish verb "atender", "to wait upon" or "to give service to", e.g. wait upon a table of diners; however, second-generation Spanish speakers in the Anglo-sphere use the verb as "to attend", instead of "to assist".
• The Spanish verb asistir, in Spanglish denotes "to assist" rather than true Spanish "to attend".
• Suceso, "event", is wrongly used to denote "success", leading to expressions such as fue todo un suceso, "it was a complete success" (although this can be ambiguous; interpreted in Spanish this means "it was a big event", which sometimes means about the same anyway).
• "Push" and empujar are true cognates. In Spanglish, "puchar" is used to the same effect.
• The expression llamar para atrás is calqued literally from the English "to call back"; cf. standard Spanish devolver la llamada, "to return the call". This example of calquing an English idiomatic phrase to Spanish is common Puerto Rican usage, even in zones with a lot of Hispanics like Southern Idaho.
• Van (la van) is Spanglish for the American English word Van, instead of the standard Spanish la furgoneta.
• Parquear is used instead of the correct Spanish estacionar, it derives from the English word ' park'. However, Standard and Colloquial Spanish uses the verb aparcar, which is accepted in the diccionary but also appears to derive from English.
• The verbs hanguear derives from "to hang out".
• Spanish verbs conversar and charlar mean "to chat"; however, an on-line conversation by IRC or IM is Spanglish chatear (Spanish "to drink a glass of wine", uncommon).
• Troca or troque denotes "pickup truck" instead of the standard Spanish camioneta.
• The adjectives serioso | seriosa denote the English serious instead of the proper serio | seria.
• Actualmente, meaning in Spanish "currently," is frequently misused to replace English actually and in fact. The proper Spanish term for actually is de hecho.
• Marketa is a frequently used word derived from the English word market (as in Supermarket) instead of the standard Spanish word mercado.
• Lonche is the Spanglish usage for lunch, as in "hora del lonche" (lunchtime). The correct Spanish term is almuerzo. Lonchera is also used to mean lunch box.
• "Heavy" used unchanged in expressions such as qué heavy, muy heavy, akin to "how awful/terrible".

Other borrowings include: emailear or emiliar, "to email"; nerdo, "nerd"; laptop, "laptop computer"; twittear, to use Twitter; facebookear, to use Facebook and googlear, to use Google.

Calques from Spanish to English also occur. In some cases Spanglish morphs into simple bad English. Some examples of either:

• Some include cowboy and cowgirl, coming, respectively, from the Spanish words "vaquero" and "vaquera"; people that handle cattle.
• An interesting calque is canyon or gorge, in English, from "cañón" (geomorphology), in Spanish.
• The word rodeo has the same meaning in English as it has in the original Spanish.
• Many verbs are given indirect objects they do not have in standard English; notably, "put": "She puts him breakfast on the couch!" or "Put it the juice" (turn on the power), these correspond to the Spanish poner and meter with the indirect object pronouns le and les, indicating the action was done on behalf of someone else.
• One can "get down" from a car, instead of "getting out" of a car; this translates to the Spanish bajarse, "to dismount" or "to descend" from a motor vehicle.
• One "drinks" one's pills, from the phrase tomar medicina. The word tomar more often means drink than take in conversational Spanish, which extensively uses the word agarrar as the equivalent to take.
• U.S. and Latin American Spanglish speakers use the verb fiestar, "to party", which corresponds with fiesta, "a party", these derive from the standard Spanish verb festejar, "to celebrate", while divertirse is "to have fun", "to party" in slang American English.
• British people in Argentina use "camp" for "countryside" (from "campo") and drop many everyday formal and slang Spanish words into English ("I'll take the colectivo" (bus)). Sometimes a Spanish phrase is literally translated, incongruously and as a joke, into English: in the Buenos Aires Herald English-language newspaper "ex-president Néstor Kirchner 'could not with his genius' (to express it in Spanglish)", understood by English-speakers with reasonable knowledge of Spanish to mean "could not go against his nature".
• The expression "touch-and-go" is used by Spanish speakers in the Rio de la Plata area to refer to an occasional encounter with a sexual partner, which literally translates into Spanish as tocar e irse, meaning "no strings attached".

This is a code mixture dialogue from the Spanglish novel Yo-Yo Boing!, by Giannina Braschi:

Ábrela tú.

¿Por qué yo? Tú tienes las keys. Yo te las entregué. Además, I left mine adentro.

¿Por qué las dejaste adentro?

Porque I knew you had yours.

¿Por qué dependes de mí?

Just open it, and make it fast.

In English:

You open it.

Why me? You've got the keys. I gave them to you. Besides, I left mine inside.

Why did you leave them inside?

Because I knew you had yours.

Why do you always depend on me?

Just open it, and make it fast.

This is a code-switching dialogue:

"Yo no estoy de acuerdo con eso. But,anyhow,I think I will try again to get it."

"I have lived in Miami for a long time, pero soy cubano."

In English:

"I disagree with that. But, anyhow, I think I will try again to get it."

"I have lived in Miami for a long time, but I am Cuban."