Finding a ‘Muy Friquiado’ Way to Speak

Although English is still the chief language of commerce and the courts in this subtropical U.S. city, more and more the language of the people is Spanglish.

Want coffee cut with a little milk, to go? Even a recent arrival from Pittsburgh, Pa., learns to say, “Give me a cortadito para llevar.”

Spanglish, a mix of English and Spanish whipped into a flavorful linguistic stew, may violate the rules of grammar in two tongues and produce some unlikely vocabulary words. But it is colorful, expressive and being used with increasing frequency in many U.S. communities with a substantial Latino population, from Los Angeles to New York, from Chicago to the Texas border.

But among major U.S. cities, only in Miami is a majority of the population Latino, and only in Miami do as many as 90% of all Latinos report using Spanish as their primary language at home.

Thus, although English remains the common language for most of greater Miami’s 2 million residents, Spanglish turns up frequently in newspaper want ads, in notices posted on grocery store bulletin boards, on local talk shows and in popular music.

“We are the No. 1 Spanglish-speaking market in the U.S.,” asserted Kid Curry, program director of WPOW-FM, a top-rated Miami station with a play list that includes songs in Spanish by Puff Daddy and Los Umbrellos, as well as English-language hits by Jewel and Notorious B.I.G.

“We are a bilingual station. Our only policy [for disc jockeys] is to use as much Spanish as possible.”

Of course, in greater Miami, home to 600,000 Cuban Americans, much of the Spanglish heard here has a distinctive Cuban flavor. For an idea of how Miami’s lingua franca works, imagine a conversation between two young women in a downtown office.

“Try to finish that filing soon,” one might say, “because Mr. Enriquez esta muy friquiado since his parents arrived from Cuba, and he has to sleep en el pin pan pun.”

“Chill, chica. I’ll get to it. Dame un break.”

In the exchange above, “friquiado” is from the English phrase “freaked out,” while “pin pan pun” refers to a small cot, common in Cuba, and the three steps necessary to pull out a pin, unfold the mattress and lay down.

“Some people say Spanglish will lead to the downfall of the Spanish language,” said Bill Cruz, a writer for the magazine Generation who has published a pocket guide to what he calls Cuban Americanisms. “But this is how people speak, in both languages. And even native English speakers have started to pick it up.”

Scholars worry that those who use Spanglish are handicapping themselves by learning neither proper English nor good Spanish. Yale University comparative literature professor Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria worried in a recent opinion column that the proliferation of Spanglish “poses a grave danger to Hispanic culture and to the advancement of Hispanics in mainstream America.”

Not only are young Latinos not learning good Spanish, he said, but the language itself is being debased by an invasion of English words and directly translated English idioms.

Gonzalez Echevarria said he doesn’t object when words like biper--for the English word beeper--are picked up and spelled phonetically when there is no Spanish equivalent. But he does cringe when he hears store clerks ask, “Como puedo ayudarlo?”--a literal translation of “How can I help you?”--rather than the correct Spanish phrase “Que desea?”

Other writers and scholars maintain that all living languages are in constant flux, mirroring changes in society, and even serving to close racial and cultural divides. Latina novelist Rosario Ferre, born in Puerto Rico, calls Spanglish “a marvelously effective vehicle of communication among Latinos and gives them a particular sense of identity that entails power and psychological stability.”

But mixes of English and Spanish have moved into the U.S. mainstream as well, primarily through popular music and literature.

As American and Latino cultures mix, an evolving spoken Spanglish reflects a bilingual reality that leads to the coinage of new words and phrases--and even to the rise of regional dialects.

While Spanglish speakers move back and forth from Spanish to English, University of Miami sociologist Max J. Castro suggests, few speakers are fully bilingual--equally comfortable speaking and writing in the two languages.

Many Spanglish speakers are Latinos who speak Spanish to relatives at home, English in school or the workplace, and an amalgam of the two tongues in informal conversations with friends or while shopping, said Castro.

Thus, the change from one language to another--what linguists call code-switching--is usually prompted when speakers “get out of their comfort zone in one of the two languages. They get out there, get scared, and then come back to the stronger language.”

While Spanglish may work as effective communication in a bilingual society, Castro said he also recognizes that grammatical rules get broken.

“In mixing languages, I hear people adopt English structures, syntax and words into language; it’s a penetration of English into Spanish,” said Castro.

“And it’s subtle. For example, saying ‘Estoy en acuerdo’ instead of ‘Estoy de acuerdo’ to mean ‘I agree.’ It models English, but it is incorrect Spanish.”

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Also Known as Cubonics

Since Cuban Americans represent nearly 60% of all Latinos in greater Miami, it may have been inevitable that an offshoot of Spanglish, in which Spanish idioms are literally translated into English, has come to be known here as Cubonics--a play on Ebonics, the African American speech that provoked controversy earlier this year when the Oakland school system considered viewing it as a second language.

In Cubonics, for example, the Spanish idiom “Me embarcaste”--”You stood me up”--gets translated into English as “You embarkated me.” Or, one young Cuban American might ask another, “What’s the cheese on that new South Beach club?” in which the word “cheese” is a partial homophone for the Spanish word “chisme,” or gossip.