The mix of Spanish and English is the world’s fastest growing linguistic hybrid. Experts calculate that it is spoken by 50 million people
In a single sentence, Rolando Hernández moves smoothly between English and Spanish. His narration is uninterrupted through shifts from one tongue to the other. He’s not doing it to translate what he’s saying; he simply takes for granted that the person listening to him will understand. The 26-year-old Cuban American is trilingual: he doesn’t just speak English and Spanish, but also Spanglish, a hybrid speech variety that was born out of the mix of Anglo and Hispanic cultures. In his Miami neighborhood of Hialeah, where three-quarters of residents are of Cuban descent and 95% of the population is Hispanic, Spanglish (in Spanish, espanglish) rules: “It’s everywhere, from the closest McDonald’s drive-through to the galleries in Wynwood,” says Hernández.
Though it is hard to know the exact number of people who speak Spanglish, it’s estimated that there are 35 to 40 million people in the United States who, like Hernández, communicate with it, more than half of the 62 million Latinos who live in the country. It’s a number that will only grow as the Latino community expands over the coming years: by 2060, it is predicted that one in every four U.S. residents will have Latino heritage. “It is the fastest-growing hybrid language in the world,” says Ilan Stavans, professor of Latinx and Latin American studies at Massachusetts’s Amherst College.
And it still sucks…
Just look at the rules on how to pluralize something, or verb tenses.
Other languages have a few exceptions from loaner words, English is mostly exceptions because it’s mostly made up not only if loaner words, but loaner words from such different languages.
We threw shit randomly for thousands of years with no rhyme or reason because it was a language solely for commoners. The British monarchy didn’t even speak it for centuries…
Nobody cared what English as a language was doing.
English has way simpler verb tenses than other languages, and minimal verb conjugation. The lack of rules can be annoying, but it also makes it easier to use with minimal grasp of the language since it relys on context and general vibes so much.
Nobility and upper classes used French to communicate until 200 years ago, and that language is an absolute bear to try and grasp. The spellings are zany, conjugations and tenses are all over the place, and there is an unspoken tonal aspect that makes Parisians turn their nose up at people who even jave a solid grasp of the language.
The only perfect language is one that never gets used.