Spanglish

[Peter Constable]

I think it depends on the situation. There will be cases of borrowings without significant bilingualism. E.g., if you travel to (say) China and interact with people that have not studied English, there may yet be some English words that have made their way into common usage that they know. That would be considered borrowing or loan words; it would not be considered code switching. Code switching assumes there is bilingualism — it's more than just using some load words. But there may also be cases in between: e.g., people listen to English-speaking music artists and hear certain words enough that they pick them up and perhaps will use them in certain contexts, such as music, but the words aren't in common usage in their first language, and they can't really speak English except for repeating those words.


Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: Shawn Steele 
Sent: Friday, January 6, 2017 11:25 AM
To: Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft.com>; Michael Everson <everson at evertype.com>; ietf-languages at alvestrand.no
Subject: RE: Spanglish

> But Harald's point still is valid: for someone to understand "Spanglish" content, they need to have some level of proficiency in both Spanish and English — i.e., both languages are required for comprehension of the content.

I could be wrong here, but my understanding is that you may not need full understanding of both languages.  You might use the words from one language to fill holes in the other.   Eg: with the Spanglish poetry earlier, I could read with pretty good comprehension the first example.  The second one was much more challenging.

-Shawn