By Anonymous
For the week where we read about linguistic differences between age groups and generations, we did an activity in class where we talked to a partner about the way we used to speak when we were teenagers. In this activity I talked to my partner who happens to speak Spanish as a first language about how people in my age group used to use Spanish words and phrases, because we thought it made us look cool or funny. Sometimes the Spanish words and phrases were real and sometimes they were not. Then the more I thought about it the more I realized that many age groups in the United States do this, not just teenagers, and it is very common in the popular media. Towards the end of the semester when I was trying to figure out my topic for my final project I was talking to Professor Sarkar about this aforementioned linguistic phenomena, and she told me it’s called mock Spanish and referred me to a good article by Jane Hill (1998) that explains why this is linguistic racism.
This article was enlightening. I learned of a term I had never previously heard of before: linguistic appropriation. This happens when hispanophones who speak Spanglish in public are called impolite, harsh English-only policies are created to restrict their language use, and their accents are criticized whether they truly have a Spanish accent or not, while simultaneously anglophones borrow from Spanish, speak with heavy accents, and carelessly use the language incorrectly without reproach. It is clearly a case of linguistic inequality, in addition to making a mockery of the language and culture and trivializing hispanophones’ contributions to American culture (Hill, 1998).
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