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.
The worst part about it, is English is hands down in the hardest languages to learn, and almost completely nonsensical.
And just communicating in it, tends to make people think and behave in a more individualist manner.
Like I know I’ll get shit for saying this, I always do:
But as a species we should have made a “common tounge” long ago like Lord of the Rings.
One that’s easy to learn, and has a neutral effect in nias of thinking.
Everyone is free to use their native language, and learn any other language they want.
But have the “common tounge” be something everyone, evwrywhere, learns.
If we never do that, then we’re going to see what we’re seeing now. English becoming a default language and pushing out others from all facets of life.
Language extinction is a real thing. If England hadn’t colonized so much shit and fired natives to only use English, then it would have been forgotten about. Even the English monarchy didn’t use English for most of the languages existence.
It’s such a weird series of things that lead to one of the worst languages on the planet to become the default everyone tries to learn as a second language at best, and destroying other languages at worst
It has it’s own challenges, sure… but english isn’t even remotely close to being the hardest language to learn
The spelling is messed up, it has (like virtually every language) a bunch of exceptions to rules, but the grammar has been hugely simplified over the past 1000 years.
Not to mention that the biggest advantage to learning languages is familiarity and the fact that English is, well, everywhere makes it easier.
Sure Esperanto is easier, but for most of the world something like Japanese would be muuuuuch harder
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.