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.
Stop signs still had “stop”. Although for some reason I think they originally were just a red stop sign shape that had a smaller sign with the word “stop” added under it. For some reason that was a thing in rural areas for a while.
But like the signs on the corner that had the name of the street/road. And instead of street/road it has the German work for that. Streisb? I can’t make an estatest or however it was spelled, but the weird capital B with a tail that means “ss” .
But after WW2 they updated the legal street names to Angelicized names, I think as a result of a larger state/national law. It was something the locals didn’t want tho, and no one official was checking tiny villages, so they left the original signs up, even though that’s not the name of the street anymore?
Like the town Butcher had a giant old school sign with zero English or even the word Butcher. Now there’s little signs in English under all of them that says what it is. I think because they were trying to be a tourist destination, because literally all the architecture and landscape looked like you were really in 1800s Deutschland. Like, in school my German class (yeah, even towns over had the option of learning German until very recently) we took field trips there.
On a side note, my German teacher’s first memory was the Allies attacking the train that was carrying her to a concentration camp, then having to escape through the woods during the fighting. And I swear I’m not even that old now.
I could probably find some kind of article on it, because the whole thing is interesting… But unfortunately I already said it was next to my home town, and man, there are some people who really don’t like me on here, and I don’t want to put that info out.