It goes a lot deeper than this in Miami. A big chunk of suburban miami is populated by white Cuban exiles and their descendants. Growing up we spoke in Spanglish, which involves switching back and forth between English and Spanish, often multiple times within the same sentence. The switch between languages isn’t random, though. There are rules that govern which words you should say in which language, when to switch, etc. I’ve never heard anyone investigating how these rules work, but there are millions of Americans of Cuban descent in Miami for whom Spanglish is their true native language.
What I find really interesting perhaps more than even Spanglish or this new dialect, is that back in 2006-2007 I did a lot of business trips to Miami and found it wild that many non-Spanish speakers (only English speakers) spoke English with a detectable Spanish accent. I think it makes perfect sense on reflection, but was eyebrow raising for me.
When English is spoken by Lithuanians I've noticed an unusual Americanish accent that can sometimes be quite strong. Naturally it makes sense and TV, Films and other media sources are a key teacher for English outside of schooling. But it is a little odd to be around basket-ball playing, American accented Lithuanians.
Certainly a similar situation. Where English spoke in your environment (in your example likely in the home by immigrant parents and grandparents where English is not their first language) you would develop the pronunciations used by those around you.
There was a video I saw of an American with a burger shop in Tokyo. He had adopted something of a vaguely Japanese-sounding accent. I think it just happens to some people
Autism, ADHD, and various other neurodivergencies can all lead to people 'mirroring' those around them, including picking up others accents. As a notable personal example, my mom and I were recently talking about how I don't 'sound gay', which, while a stereotype, it is actually something I do, especially when around other gay men with the same affect. I pointed out that all my non-southern friends say the same thing about my southern accent, until they hear me talk on the phone with someone back home.
Though I notice it in myself very prominently, I think everyone is prone to this kind of mirroring behavior to some extent, and I could easily see someone living in a new region for a while developing a new accent that doesn't sound quite like the one they came to the region with.
Absolutely, which is why I was presenting it in the context of my experience as someone with those conditions. I don’t have a frame of reference otherwise, and if you read my last paragraph, you’ll notice I did concede that I think it’s something that happens in everyone and is more expressed in people with those conditions, which is a studied phenomenon.
Don’t you think it’s weird to ascribe hidden meanings to someone’s words?
I know someone with your conditions and they often start stories in the exact same way you did here, stories that might apply to like 80% of neurotypical people as well just like yours did. It just sounds a bit weird, and there’s no ascribing hidden meaning to someone’s words behind that.
Yup, it's wild that the pathology is so clearly obvious once people know to look for it, and yet we still have to have these conversations.
I'm getting from your reply here that you completely understood my original comment, meaning your comment to me asking about it was simply to provoke this conversation, not to actually talk about my point. Which is interesting, because I'm really interested (some may say eSPECIALy interested) in this topic, and would happily talk to you about it, had your original question been this message instead.
I'm also willing to concede that the autism diagnosis and acceptance is still really new for me, so I'm going through the phase of putting back together who I was and dealing with the fact that a lot of things that I've blamed myself for, for literally years, were simply because of this condition, and that some of my coping mechanisms have in fact been making me worse for a long time. It's weird to re-learn who you are as a person at 32 years old after having felt so sure of it for so long.
Which is what I think leads to these overly long explanations. I've been so misunderstood for so long that I'm literally afraid of it happening now.
I believe you’re mixing up two people here, since the comment you replied to here was the only one I made in this chain thus far.
What you describe in this comment is the exact same thing I’ve heard from my co-worker about this topic, however. She said it’s a relief to be able to attribute a lot of the things she has seemingly struggled with in the past to the new diagnoses she’s got.
Indeed I did, sorry for that, but I stand by the content of what I said.
I agree with your co-worker, it is a massive relief to know these issues aren't fundamental flaws of your character, but behaviors attributable to a condition that can be managed, accounted for, and worked around.
The burnout and stress you feel before diagnosis/acceptance is intense, and, for some of us, debilitating. I have been remarkably fortunate to have a job with co-workers who have enough compassion and understanding to let me be honest about how I'm feeling, and understanding that what I feel is valid, though not always correct or in alignment with my logical thoughts. It's been complicated and involved a lot of boundary setting and apologies when I still fail, but that's all gotten easier since I just _know why_.
My sister, a Canadian, has lived in England a decade now. The locals can't hear it, but I can hear her accent and how she generally speaks has changed quite a bit.
She can hear it and knows it but can't help it at all.
I've lived in England all my life aside from several years in Wales and it's interesting how contrived the accent a lot of foreigners associate with us actually is. There's a lot of natural variation in our accents (they can change from town to town over the course of a dozen miles in extreme cases) but RP, 'posh English' or 'BBC English' was a product of 20th century radio broadcasting based on the natural accent of the south-eastern upper classes and somewhat controversially declared to be the standard pronunciation for British English.
The result of this is that a few of my friends and I have very similar sounding accents despite our families being from other ends of the country and having very different 'default' accents; it's entirely down to our respective mothers telling us to 'speak properly' every time we'd drop our Ts or show other 'common' habits of speech as kids!
I’ve seen that one as well! Interesting video for sure. I was also surprised to hear him say he did not speak Japanese despite living there for 20 years and being married to a Japanese woman.
I live in the south and admittedly have a “detectable” southern accent. To me that Cajun accent is really unlike every other southern accent, so I guess I focus more on the French-ish aspect of it because I don’t really hear the southern in it.
I can distinguish the differences between many southern accents, to the point where I could pinpoint a speaker with roots in Georgia/Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, SC, NC, Texas, etc with pretty good accuracy. Others not from the south would tend to lump a lot of them together as a “southern” accent where I see lots of differences and distinctions. Cadence and “y’all” is sometimes the only real commonality among the region.
There's a less widespread but similar phenomenon with the older generation of Polish immigrants in Chicago, who use Polish grammar but an almost entirely English lexicon. I've met a few people who I straight up couldn't understand, and I'm bilingual in the two languages they fused together.
I have some distant family in the Chicago metro area like this, even my own parents professed to not having a clue what great uncle Tomasz was saying most of the time.
Is that at all influenced by regional differences in the Poles that came to Chicago? I grew up with a lot of first-gen highlander Polish-Americans (in the Chicago suburbs). They apparently have some differences with earlier important groups, eg, my family friends who pronounce grandmother "Busia".
Highlanders have their own dialect, but it's intelligible the same way Londoners can understand Scots. What happens after long exposure to Chicago is that half the lexicon gets swapped out with English words pronounced with Polish phonetics. Those people in their youth spoke very easily understandable Polish, but what they speak today makes sense only to them.
I think so? Google suggests that's what I mean? In English - the only language I know - they always said Highlanders. The only other distinguishing piece of information I have is that this was a common car window sticker: https://i.etsystatic.com/16056651/r/il/a2f7e1/2469515581/il_...
> who use Polish grammar but an almost entirely English lexicon. I've met a few people who I straight up couldn't understand
I caused a similar confusion with my phone. When I switch my phone from English to my native language I don't understand the menus anymore, and the translations sound ridiculous.
> The switch between languages isn’t random, though
We kind of do this already in mainline English, switching between Germanic, French, Latin and Greek based on some unwritten rules. Adding Spanish wouldn’t really change things that much considering its close relatives French and Latin are already so well represented. Though I’m sure the Spanish part is more dominant in this dialect than it would be eventually in the broader language.
It's extremely common in every situation like this, the grammar of the original language stays but the lexicon (nouns especially) gets rapidly switched out with borrowings and calques from the surrounding language.
Oh interesting. Japanese is like this. Many years ago it absorbed Chinese nouns, but more recently it has absorbed many English nouns.
Some Americans learning Japanese will regret this last part- wishing that the language stayed “pure”, as if it were ever actually pure, whatever that means.
> wishing that the language stayed “pure”, as if it were ever actually pure, whatever that
I have wished for consistency in every language I have ever learned or tried to learn, which I suspect is what "pure" would mean in this context. Imported words often use different roots and conjugate inconsistently, which makes it harder to remember and use them. (Though of course, as sibling comments point out, any living language will import from other languages; the only escape is in conlangs... but if you actually used those they'd get the same difficulty:])
Japanese is fascinating because they have an different alphabet symbolism for imported words. It has the same phonetics as native Japanese, but the written language distinguishes the origin.
Japanese has three forms of writing: Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana.
Kanji, which stands for "Han Language/Characters", was imported from China; "Kan" is the Japanese reading of "Han". It's used more or less as when it was imported and is largely interchangable with Traditional Chinese.
Hiragana originated as a simplification of cursive Kanji, because people both today and from a few millenia ago find Kanji too complicated to deal with at times. Its name means "Simplified Kana", in contrast to Kanji.
Hiragana is used to accent Kanji and connect sentences together for better flow and comprehension (known as Okurigana), can be used by itself (sometimes in place of Kanji, especially for childrens writing), and is sometimes used to convey an image of cuteness ("kawaii") and femininity due to its curvy styling. Pronunciation guides for Kanji (known as Furigana), if present, are also written with Hiragana.
Katakana similarly originated as a simplification of Kanji, though its styling is more straight than Hiragana to enable easier writing with instruments besides brushes or pens on paper (eg: engraving in wood or stone). Its name means "Partial Kana", signifying that it's derived from the parts of Kanji characters.
Katakana is used today to write foreign words, scientific names (including Japanese ones), and certain Japanese names such as those of businesses. It's also used to give emphasis, like how bold or italic styling or all caps is used in English. In times past, Katakana was also used instead of Hiragana to accent and connect sentences.
Both Hiragana and Katakana have respective characters in their alphabets and phonetically can be interchanged character for character.
The common modern day understanding that Katakana "is for foreign words" is merely just one of its use cases.
With modern French the interesting one trying to fight this sort of natural evolution by defering a lot of language changes to their Academy and intentionally replacing calques and borrowings with "corrected" versions. Their Academy isn't always successful in getting French speakers to conform to their "corrected" words, but it is fascinating that they still try.
Similar happens in Spanish, I think just the attempt is valuable in and of itself, if for no other purpose that asking the question, "can we do better?". Otherwise one ends with English and its lowest-common denominator antics
In Spain at least there is a difference between estacionar (to stop with the engine running) and aparcar (to stop and leave). In Mexico the two things are more or less merged, and if you say estacionar or parquear depends on how much English influence there is on your idiolect... Or how close to the border you are o/~ y sus troconas del año, que afuera tenian parqueadas o/~
Actually "aparcar" and "estacionar" are synonyms (at least in Spain, but I think also in latin America [0])
Maybe you meant "parar" or "detener" (to stop), that don't clarify by them self if the engine has to be stopped or not (usually is the whole sentence what clarifies that)
Parcheggio and parcheggiare are used in Italian too, I'm pretty sure they're not derived from English, but from "parco" (park), which has Indo-European roots.
I think the point of the parent comment is that, although English is full of borrowed words and phrases, you're not switching to speaking French/German/Latin while saying them. You're still speaking English, it's just a subset of English which was borrowed from somewhere.
You can define it that way, and sure, there's a certain difference when we borrow phrase bits from languages we don't actually understand and use them as an expression (inter alia, et cetera) and when we do. But the latter also happens when bilingualism is common.
I won't actually consider these wholesale expression borrowings part of English until they spread to English speakers who don't speak the borrowed language.
I had a conversation with a colleague last week, he's a native French speaker, I'm a native German speaker. We switched between French, German and English, every time we had a problem expressing what we wanted to say in a language and then continuing the conversation a little in another language before switching again. That's a form of code-switching.
What you do is using phrases and words that you learned without speaking the language they're borrowed from. Sometimes borrowing words even limits the meaning, when you say "Gesundheit" you don't mean the general concept of health, you mean "bless you". If I asked you to translate et cetera you would probably not be able to unless you spoke Latin.
I'm bilingual in English and German, but when I use "Kindergarten" or "Uber" in an English sentence, that's still English, while when I use "Sorry" in a German sentence, that's still German.
It's really noticeable for me because when speaking English I've subconsciously adopted a British accent, but when using English loan words in German I'll automatically pronounce them in a very German way.
I notice this as well working with my Dutch colleagues as an American. They’ll be discussing some bit of code and all of a sudden need to reference a programming concept or a class name that is English in origin and they will use their own accent. If I then come back to talk to them later about the same thing, it will have a different accent when we are speaking English together.
> or "Uber" in an English sentence, that's still English
That should be "Über", really, shouldn't it?
I don't know, I've never used the service, but the vowel-sound "Ü" doesn't occur in native English. I guess most people just say "Oober" and be done with it. To me, "Über" looks like a foreign word, not an import. In English, I think it's used only as a brand-name, and as part of the word "Übermensch", a term associated with a particular philosophy book.
Words are assimilated to greater or lesser degrees. I'd say that au revoir is now English, as I'd expect any competent English speaker to understand it, but it's still commonly written in italics and pronounced in a noticeably French accent. Meanwhile, café is fully anglicised and not really registered as foreign at all, but that pesky accent remains in the written form, giving a clue to its soupçon of French (the truly English form of the word is probably caff).
Oh, I'm not sure about that. I say "Kaffay", that is I anglicise the French pronunciation, even though I have a reasonable French accent. But many English people pronounce it as "Kaff".
But at one time Kindergarten was code switching and was still firmly German. It only became common English after first being used as a German word dropped into English sentences. It still remains a German word no matter how familiar that German word is to English speakers.
Yeah this is an interesting one. We don't really have a good English equivalent for "guten apetit" or "dobrou chuť" but bon appétit feels like the most well-known loan phrase that could stand in. "Enjoy your meal" appears to be sort of popular in restaurants (i.e. the server will say it to you) but it sounds so cold and weird to me. I really wish we just leaned into bon appétit instead.
Exactly (although I would have used the word "etymology" rather than "root", which means s.t. else to a linguist). The fact that a word might have been borrowed into English nearly a thousand years ago does not mean that you're speaking French when you use it, any more than the fact that you might have had a French ancestor a thousand years ago makes you French.
Genetically you are French if your ancestors are French. A word can be French and used in English as a common word. You're still saying a French word no matter how familiar it has become to you. Your claim seems to be that after an exact number of years of being used by English speakers a word is no longer French. Which doesn't hold up when you try to assign that exact number. Au revoir.
Nah there isn't an "identity function" for words like that, nor can a single language "claim" a word. When a language fully assimilates a word with its origin in another language, it also becomes fully a word in the assimilating language as well. The connotation, denotation, pronunciation, and/or orthography can each change, or not, in either language or both, and it is a different word from that point on regardless.
Your point about "genetically french" is also wrong in almost exactly the same way so it provides an illustrative comparison. There's no single french ethnicity, just people who are french and some observable trends. Someone is french who has french citizenship, a word is english when it is widely spoken by native english speakers.
I also need to point out that this is not a matter of opinion. Linguistics is an established field and consensus is clear on this. You are confidently asserting things that are well outside the mainstream of the science.
No language is claiming the word. English uses German words. When my Austrian friend spoke German to his son this morning I understood the word kindergarten because I have a small German vocabulary like all English speakers do. Kindergarten is simply a German word that English speakers understand.
That's wrong. These words came directly from servents using the words of their Normandy ruling class in England. They are French words. The fact that you can no longer perceive that is my entire point.
When English people in the 13th century spoke the word hotel they might be code switching between English and Old French (but that's debatable because it seems this word ultimately has a Latin root)
However this word is part of the English lexicon today and require no knowledge of French, and as such isn't an example of code switching
In order to use and understand the word kindergarten I need to understand and speak at least one German word. That's knowledge of German, even if it's a tiny bit of knowledge. The fact that some English speakers aren't aware of their knowledge of German doesn't make kindergarten no longer a German word.
Code-switching (linguistically) requires the speaker to be multilingual and it describes the process and patterns used to determine when words are spoken in one language versus the other.
Imported vocabulary/borrowed words simply describes loanwords that make it into the common lexicon of speakers of the receiving language but not necessarily speakers of the donor language.
I don’t disagree with the idea that code-switchers introduce new vocabulary to the general public at all, in fact, the two terms describe a word or phrase at different phases of its journey to integration within a language. In other words, there exists a point in the history of the language or dialect, the use of word or phrase ceases to be code-switching and becomes widely accepted as imported vocabulary.
There is a distinction, however, that not all words that are used via code-switching are going to become part of common enough vernacular that it would become accepted within a language, and likewise, there may be cases where loanwords do not enter a language via speakers that code-switch it into their daily vocabulary.
I think a good analogy is imported cheese. It's still Italian cheese even if you grew up with mozzarella as an American and consider pizza an American food. So while these words might be completely familiar to an English speaker you are still using a foreign word and are speaking and understand a very tiny bit of a foreign language. I know a tiny bit of German thanks to kindergarten. A word my Austrian friend spoke in a German sentence this morning while speaking with his son. My very tiny set of German vocabulary along with the context made it easy enough to figure out where they are headed today.
I feel like German shouldn't count. The relatedness of these two languages is such that there are so many cognates and similar grammar, you could probably understand a lot of German sentences just by listening closely and being curious.
But kindergarten is imported the whole world over. You can't say you know German based on that. Code-switchers understand the grammar of both languages, not just a few words.
I do think the Normans entering England, or Germanic peoples mixing with Celts, or Celts being conquered by Romans for a brief time -- all of that probably produced code switchers in their moment in time, with lasting impact to our vocabular and grammar. But it's not code switching anymore. It's modern English now.
Similar things happened in Spain with Celts, Romans, Arabs, Goths, Basques... Not to mention all the regional Romance languages that survive today (Galician, Catalan). They conquered the Americas and got some infusion of that vocabulary too. Castilian borrows vocabulary from all of these. But monolingual Castilian speakers do not "code switch".
I don't necessarily agree with everyone above, but..
When the first person used "hotel" in an English sentence, they were struggling to find a suitable word and failed, and fell back to another language for it. Or possibly they thought it was a better word than the English equivalent for some reason. They thought of it as a French word, with all the implications of it in French, rather than English.
When I use "hotel" in a sentence, it's just part of the language I grew up with. To me, it's an English word, not something I fell back on in another language.
That said, the "Spanglish" referenced here is being learned from birth by people, so they aren't context switching either. They're just speaking how they learned to speak. Older people are probably still context switching, but younger people likely aren't.
Code switching is when you're speaking language X, then switch over to language Y for one or more words. If there's another person present who knows X but doesn't know Y, they'll probably be lost when you do that.
Borrowing might have started out as code switching, or something else, but when you use words borrowed a long time ago from Y in language X, people who know X but not necessarily Y will probably understand you. There are of course technical terms that you might use which not everyone will understand. Some of these will have been borrowed from another language, like electron or perigee or perihelion, while others might be words made up and not borrowed, like quark or boson or fermion. The fact that some were borrowed, and others not, does not make the one code switching and the other something else.
And if you're code switching, you'll probably be pronouncing the words from language Y with the expected pronunciation of Y, whereas if you're using words borrowed from Y into X, they will probably be pronounced differently from how they would be pronounced if you were code switching into Y (or just speaking Y), and the semantics may have changed. Take the word 'mesa' in English, describing a flat-topped hill in the southwest. If you're a non-Spanish speaker, you'll probably pronounce that last vowel as a schwa, and only have the flat-topped hill meaning in mind. Whereas if you code switched into Spanish, that last vowel would probably sound like the /a/ in 'father', and you might be talking about a table.
My point could have been clearer but it was essentially that imported words started out as code switching. The fact that someone mimicking a code switcher doesn't understand French doesn't make hotel no longer a French word.
you don't, but there is an element of code-switching that goes on in English. given that French, Greek and Latin-origin words in English tend to have come down from the clergy or the aristocracy, there is a subconscious subtext of power and education - and on the flipside pretense and elitism - that can be given off with particular use or lack of use of those words. some people do this naturally and some people affect it - Boris Johnson is well-known for it - but, while not quite the same as switching between Spanish and English - it is a thing that occurs
Not me. It read to me as the kind of pretentious garble spoken by someone who doesn't know the meaning of the words they're uttering, and perhaps doesn't even know what thought they're trying to communicate.
"The omega du jour" means nothing. You're parsing the sentence wrong.
The alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. It's the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, and a Biblical reference to the Almighty. And then du jour means "of the day".
I don't think you're referring to anything remotely approaching bilingual speech. Educated English speakers might use "a priori" or "in vino veritas" or some word in French here in there, but those are tiny changes compared to how spanglish is spoken in Florida and other parts.
Sounds like a standard Creole language. I know that phenomena related to merging languages of populations in contact are well studied, but don't know enough to link to any relevant lit. sorry.
Creole languages are more about "20 people speaking 20 different languages create a new common merged language", spanglish sound more like "20k bilinguals with varying preference between the 2 languages mix and match the 2 languages for convenience".
This assuming that most spanglish speakers could hold a conversation in either languages.
> "20 people speaking 20 different languages create a new common merged language"
If you can provide an example of such a diverse set of languages becoming a new language, that would be interesting.
Creole has nothing to do with the number of languages. Creole is what you get when two groups of people with no bilingual speakers are forced to interact and develop a new language. Normally, it starts as a pidgin to facilitate trade but then develops into a full fledged language. The main difference with Spanglish being that the speakers often know both languages to a modest degree but probably would not be considered native by other native speakers. Also, there are almost 1M Dominicans alone in NYC. 20k makes it sound like some cute phenomena happening in Little Havana in Miami.
Spanglish is not a creole or dialect of Spanish because, though people claim they are native Spanglish speakers, Spanglish itself is not a language on its own, but speakers speak English or Spanish with a heavy influence from the other language. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanglish)
As the term "creole" is used in linguistics, it means a language that: a) started as a contact language, and b) has become the mother tongue of a group. So, I think you might be right, because Spanglish originated as a speech among English-Spanish bilinguals rather than as a contact language between English and Spanish communities. If Spanglish became the mother tongue of a group who couldn't speak Spanish or English, then, well...I'm not sure.
I think Creole is different, in the sense that there is emergent grammar as well. While spanglish uses a combination of English & Spanish grammar, and is more close to a mixed language
> There are rules that govern which words you should say in which language, when to switch, etc. I’ve never heard anyone investigating how these rules work,
Code-switching is not the same as 'Spanglish', 'Hinglish', etc. - the latter could be something you code-switch to with certain people (young peers say).
GP means rules, a grammar of sorts, for which words are English and which words are Spanish in the same sentence. Switching without pause, talking to the same person in the same setting.
The linked article is exactly what you’re describing. It’s linguistic code switching and covers Spanglish. It predates the more modern, broader use of the term, like having a work accent and home accent.
Post-Norman-invasion English more-or-less came from a such a hybrid that switched multiple times per sentence between bastardised French and older English.
Isn't it more like Old Norse and Old English, re: the number of basic English words that come from Old Norse[0]? The Norman influence appears to largely influence abstract domains like law, governance, and academia with the exception of the well-known culinary distinctions.
No, the Norse influence is small relative to Norman. Something like 30% of modern English is Norman-French derived, with thousands of direct cognates.
History is rarely simple though! The Normans themselves were a hybrid of Viking settlers and locals. So it's likely that quite a few of those French words we absorbed into English have Old Norse roots.
At its largest extent the Danelaw covered only about half of england, and it lasted around a century before the Kingdom of Wessex conquered first the other remaining Anglo-saxon kingdoms, then retook the Danelaw, and created a unified Kingdom of England.
Do you have any guesses as to the contours of the rules followed? Maybe family v. friend v. work usage, or such?
I've lived most my life in very multi-lingual cities and neighborhoods, and it always struck me how some English very expressive short phrases, eg. "Like, no way", were used in other language conversations. Always thought, it was the relative brevity and ubiquity, in the way "C'est la vie" was for awhile in English.
Watching international versions of Taskmaster - originally a British show, which has now been done in many countries in Europe and elsewhere- it's always been amusing to hear random English phrases get blurted out.
Brevity of phrase is part of it, but it doesn't seem to happen in conversational tones- usually either when someone is showing off or as an interjection of sorts.
What's your favorite versions? I've watched the UK and NZ ones (and I know the US one isn't worth it), but I haven't gotten into the non-English ones yet.
Other than those two, the Australian and Norweigan (Kongen Befaller) are great, though early on in Norway's seasons there'll be a fair number of repeat tasks from the UK version. Same for Denmark (Stormester), perhaps more so.
Portugal's is pretty decent, though the format runs two hours per episode. I also thought the Croation version (Direktor Svemira) was decent, though the individual cast members lean hard into their own stereotypes (Lidija as the personification of the male gaze, for example).
Sweden's is really popular, but I personally didn't care for it at all.
As with the US version, it's probably best to pretend that Spain and Belgium's didn't happen.
Thanks! I did not even realize there were so many! I imagine it's a popular format due to how well it can go for comparatively little budget and planning.
I'll have to track those down. Two hours per episode for Portugal's sounds _wild_, I'm interested to see how that goes.
One thing I love about the New Zealand one is the occasional bits of te reo Māori that get used. I know that the cultural context is very different, but the affect is similar to Ireland: most people are not truly bilingual, but almost everyone knows some of the language, and dropping a few words or phrases into your English is quite normal. Just as I might end a story with sin é (lit. translation: "that's it").
> the rules followed? Maybe family v. friend v. work usage, or such?
Given that the phenomenon happens in all languages, especially where linguistic regions meet, you would find usage influenced by
* brevity of pronunciation (e.g. “chic”, “déjà-vu”)
* preference for local coinage and accent
* dominant regional usage (e.g. computer and automotive terminology)
* *prestige* (e.g. historical EN borrowings from FR, especially for food; computer terminology; “je ne sais quoi”)
* humour, sarcasm (e.g. in Quebec, the term *bloke* is used by FR speakers to refer to EN speakers)
The majority of the work focuses on sociolinguistic aspects of Spanglish, but there are also grammatical investigations. Here's an example dissertation that cites some other studies along the same lines:
> In linguistics, code-switching or language alternation occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation or situation. Code-switching is different from plurilingualism in that plurilingualism refers to the ability of an individual to use multiple languages,[1] while code-switching is the act of using multiple languages together.
The whole rest of the article is the result of linguists studying it.
Hmm, looking further. It seems the linguistic phenomenon of code-switching is one accurate name for this, but there's also a sociological phenomenon of code-switching that is related but very different - intentional shifting based on social context or group that you're addressing.
Elsewhere in this same thread, someone was assuming the sociological cause for Spanglish, instead of the more organic linguistic cause that happens anywhere you have two cultures and languages in close contact. I suspect this blurred definition makes talking about this more complicated now, since sociological code-switching has become part of America's racialized sociology discussion.
If I had my druthers I'd split those two very different phenomena into separate terms, because they don't even produce the same kinds of linguistic patterns.
(Thanks for asking me to justify, my assumption was quite wrong regarding the scope of the term.)
> intentional shifting based on social context or group that you're addressing.
Isn't that register-switching?
It gets confusing in English, because the classier registers in English involves the use of more words of French, Latin or Greek origin, the less-classy registers rely more on anglo-saxon words.
Based on the fact that some analysis of this appeared in my undergrad Spanish courses I feel confident saying that there must be a good amount of academic literature exploring these and many other topics with Spanglish.
Need to clarify the difference between "pidgin" and "creole" here. A pidgin is a (relatively simple) language that develops for communication between two or more speech communities. A pidgin is considered to have become a creole when it has become the mother tongue of a new generation of children.
I don't think the blended languages like Spanglish and Hinglish are considered pidgins or creoles within linguistics, but I could see room for argument on that.
I struggle to imagine how this could be a controversial issue. It is just a clarification of the terminology used in linguistics, not a judgement of anyone's culture.
> This is exactly the sort of thing that’s been happening in Miami.
The example quoted is exactly the sort of thing that's not going on.
And where's the threshold for calling people bilingual? If you say "get down from the car," you're (likely) using that phrase only to people outside your environment. It's lack of fluency.
> “Thanks God,” a type of loan translation from “gracias a Dios,” is common in Miami. In this case, speakers analogize the “s” sound at the end of “gracias” and apply it to the English form.
That's just an assumption of the "mmm, let me think 2 seconds" kind.
The writer also calls it Spanish, but e.g. beef is "ternera" in Spanish. It might be Cuban Spanish, which has a fairly large vocabulary that differs from other Spanish variants.
> If you say "get down from the car," you're (likely) using that phrase only to people outside your environment. It's lack of fluency.
Fluency doesn't mean you never make such mistakes, and it also doesn't prevent you picking up unusual phrasing from your environment, even when it might have originated as a mistake. In a heavily German but English-speaking workplace, it's not just the Germans who use “until” to mean “by”.
Using a locally different sentence structure isn't a lack of fluency, it's just a different dialect.
Here in the UK every region speaks English differently. Sure, there's a kind of "standard" English spoken on TV, but the further you get from London the less it's spoken. It's not just a question of accents and local words for things, but of sentence structure too - for instance the Scots dialect has quite radically different ways of saying things than "standard" English.
The people who speak Scots are completely fluent in their local dialect. Just because the language they speak doesn't happen to correspond with the culturally dominant variant doesn't make them wrong.
Scotland is particularly interesting to me since language occurs on a continuum between Scottish Standard English (SSE) and the Scots language.
SSE features unique words ("The word 'outwith' is not used outwith Scotland") and constructions (a waiter will ask "What are you wanting?" instead of "What would you like?", and after receiving the first order they'll ask the next person "And for yourself?" instead of, e.g., "And for you?").
Scots at its Scotsiest can look like this:
> What ken ye what may cast up the morn? For whatlike is your life? Ye ar but a waff o rouk at kythes a weeock, an syne eelies awa. Ye war better tae say, "Gin it's God's will, we'll be ey tae the fore, an we s' dae this or that." But no ye, na: ye blaw an blowst o what ye'r tae dae.
And speakers will choose a point somewhere between SSE and broad Scots depending on who they're speaking with, the formality, etc. It's quite common to get Scots words like "wee", "dreich", "swither", etc. The next step up is cannae/dinnae/widnae/etc for couldn't/don't/wouldn't/etc. I recently had a Shetlander say I was "glinderin ida sun". And then at some point it switches from "SSE with a Scots influence" to "Scots".
^^^ this is kinda weird considering Cuban Spanish omits the S (and often half the rest of the letters in any given sentence, lol, at least to my lower intermediate Spanish ears), resulting in "Gracia Dio"
Omitting the /s/ is an oversimplification. Classically what happens in accents like that is that /s/ is rendered as [h]. People do this aspiration to varying extents, sometimes omitting totally, sometimes not. Presence of a vowel following nearby can make a full formed [s] appear. The "a" in gracias a dios could easily make that into "gracias a dio".
By the way I had a coworker who was a native Arabic speaker say "thanks God" a lot. I think "thank God" is a phrasing that throws off a lot of people learning English, from multiple language backgrounds.
Yeah, thought that was a weird claim. I'd wager that the form "thanks" is more frequent than "thank" in most people's English, making it easy for an L2 speaker to hypercorrect.
> The writer also calls it Spanish, but e.g. beef is "ternera" in Spanish. It might be Cuban Spanish, which has a fairly large vocabulary that differs from other Spanish variants.
You are discovering the difference between castellano and español; in addition to ternera, it's bife in some parts of South America.
What do you mean with "castellano" vs "español"? I'm a native speaker and over here we call the language in general "castellano". For me the two words are synonymous (i.e. both refer to the general language, not to some specific dialect).
Some people will use the term castellano as a way to refer to Spanish, as spoken in Spain, as opposed to 'español de España". They probably aren't looking too deeply into the differences between speakers in Spain though, as when one compares a speaker from, say, Asturias, who will probably never use half of the past tenses, and might even use an even more irregular version of ser, vs someone from different parts of Andalucia, where you could cut the /s/ sound, or the /c/ sound, or the /z/ sound, or even multiples.
Ultimately the fun part of talking about languages is that no matter how much one person might believe that their terms are clear and unambiguous, if the community of speakers is large enough, you are bound to find competing meanings either way.
Other commenter got it wrong. There are multiple dialects/languages (eg Gallego, Catalan) spoken in Spain that aren’t really common in the new world, the new world dialects are mostly based on the Castilian (castellano) dialect which was and is the prestige/official Spanish dialect promoted by the government and which settlers likely had in common.
In other words, “Español”could be thought of as a group of Spanish languages with “Castellano” being a distinct language within that group.
> There are multiple dialects/languages (eg Gallego, Catalan) spoken in Spain that aren’t really common in the new world, the new world dialects are mostly based on the Castilian (castellano) dialect which was and is the prestige/official Spanish dialect promoted by the government and which settlers likely had in common.
Let’s see if e.g. Catalan is really relevant here.
It clearly is not. Why? The original commenter brought up the supposed differences between “castellano” and “español” in the context of Cuban Spanish. The minority languages of Spain are completely irrelvant here.
There are places in Latin America where they call their Spanish “castellano” (in Spanish). While other places call it “español”. And in that context they do just mean “Spanish”, since they have no reason to care about the minority languages of Spain.
So my shot in the dark guess was that the original commenter meant to refer to the difference between Spanish spoken in Spain and Spanish spoken in Latin America.
I guess not to further muddy the waters but saying Gallego and Catalan come from Castellano is extremely problematic (though people do this, it’s still difficult to square factually)
They all come from Vulgar Latin and depending on how you split it but Portuguese and Gallego come from a common ancestor and one has an easier time understanding Gallego if one speaks Portuguese than if one speaks only Spanish and Catalan would be a post until itself once we start discussing Occitan and Valencian, but it’s also not descended from Spanish (Gallo-Romance)
TLDR I really wish people would stop according Castellano as an official language and a bunch of languages that are as older or older than Castellano as some dialect descending from Castellano.
I didn’t say it came from Castellano! I’m saying they’re all three Spanish languages/dialects. Linguistically I would consider Gallego just as real a language or dialect as Castellano, it just happens that the central Spanish government historically made Castellano into their favored tongue and not Gallego.
Castellano is the official language of the Spanish government from eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Spanish_Academy and of course decades of repression of regional languages under eg the Franco regime. I don’t mean official as in “the true language” I mean official as in “the Spanish government/regime/royal dialect for centuries”. To the point many people as you mention equate Castellano with “Spanish” which is just not true - I agree with you
Maybe I am misunderstanding your comment but it's not me that is making Castillian "official" - I think it's bullshit that other Spanish languages aren't treated with more respect it's - the historical reality that it was accorded official status due to the political dominance of Castile and consequently the use of Castillian as a common tongue
How do you make a distinction between the language they speak in Castile(s) and the one that use in other regions and is official in all Spain? You can't.
I speak Spanish but I'm not Castilian and has no relationship with those two regions (Castile-Leon and Castile-La Mancha).
Galician is a language on its own! Indeed one of the most famous kings in medieval history in Spain (Alfonso X) wrote poems in Galician because he just liked the language[1].
It's interesting that Alfonso X chose Galician as a poetic language instead of the most common one among their subjects (Spanish). He had Galician in a higher standard that Spanish. That's amazing considering the impact he had in the evolution of Spanish.
But your answer doesn’t make sense in this context. The original commenter used both of these words as if they were different. So clearly they didn’t mean that they are both “ways of calling the same language”.
Some Latin Americans will call their language Castellano. Then my guess—since one can only guess what the hell people mean—was that this has something to do with the difference between Spanish from Spain and Spanish from whatever Latin American country. (But who knows?)
Furthermore, you’ll see that the original context was Cuban Spanish versus whatever “Spanish” without any adjective means. Do you really think that your little pet peeve about the intra-politics of Spanish languages are relevant in this context? People weren’t talking about the differences between Catalan and Spanish!
Since you’re so sensitive to minority languages and whatnot, maybe you’ll understand that “settlers” might have their own words that might deviate from an Academy based in Spain.
The Royal Academy covers every dialect of Spanish and their lexicon it's composed of all the Spanish language words spoken from Mexico to Patagonia among Iberia.
It's dictionary has nearly every Spanish term registered, no matter which side of the Atlantic you choose.
RAE doesn't dictate which dialect of the Spanish it's the "correct" one. Every Spanish language subdialect it's the correct one.
For instance, the spelling of z/c before a-o-u/e-i as either /s/ or /th/ depends on the dialect you choose.
https://dle.rae.es/c
All Spanish language spoken in all countries is subject to the rules of the Royal Academy of Spanish[1] and the Association of the Academies of Spanish Language[2]. Both institutions work together in keeping an up-to-date dictionary with terms from speakers of all parts of the world.
To counter-point your claims, there are a myriad of dialects of Spanish inside Spain. Some of them even are similar to the ones used in Hispanic-America.
I'm not talking about the other languages of Spain: Aragonese, Asturian, Basque, Catalan, Galician, Valencian, Extremaduran, etc. I'm only talking about the language that is official in all Spain, Spanish (and its dialects).
As another [half-]Spaniard I can confirm this. If anything, in Spain the only difference between "español" and "castellano" is context. The term "español" is mostly used when contrasting Spanish to foreign languages (inglés, francés, chino...), while "castellano" is almost always used when contrasting it to other languages of Spain (catalán, gallego, vasco, aranés...).
And? Spanish from Spain uses parking while everyone else uses "estacionamiento".
RAE covers both and calls Spanish to the same language spoken from Mexico to Patagonia and Iberia.
The phrase "throw a photo" coming from "tirar una foto" is kind of interesting. It seems plausible that since "tirar" can be translated as "shoot" as well as "throw" that the Spanish phrase may have had an origin as a calque of English "shoot a photo". Now in Miami it is coming full circle but using a translation of a different meaning for "tirar".
I wonder how the researchers determined that the 's' in "Thanks god" was from the 's' in "gracias" when we already had "Thanks" as a short form of "Thank you" in English. There is also the formula "Thanks be to god" that is common in religious writing.
Where I am from, it's common to hear someone say "take me a picture" or "take me a photo" because the Spanish is "tomame una foto" (as opposed to the more idiomatic "take a photo of me").
I don't speak Spanish; but in French, tirer is to pull as well as to shoot, as in pulling the trigger or drawing a bow. So I was surprised that Miamians choose to render it as "throw", the opposite of "pull". So I looked it up; "tirar" is also pull and shoot in Spanish.
I wonder why it didn't turn out as "shoot a photo", which would be consistent with customary english English.
I think my takeaway is that English is very weird. You can ride a horse and you can ride in a car. You can get off a horse but you get out of a car. Many other languages use the same verb for dismounting a horse as alighting from a vehicle, it seems somewhat unusual that we specify whether or not the vehicle is enclosing you. But, not all vehicles. You get off a train and get off a bus, but even if you're in a convertible with no ceiling, you'd get out instead of off.
German has "fahren" for both driving and riding a vehicle (although as always I'm never entirely clear how much of what I know about the language is specific to here in Berlin).
Which made me realise how odd it is that English has "ride a motorbike" for even the driver of the motorbike…
I think in terms of how you move and position your body, riding a motorbike looks a lot more like riding a horse than a car. "Driving" a car is more like "driving" a carriage; you sit with both legs in front of you rather than split between the thing you're riding.
Riding a motorcycle obviously derives from riding a bicycle, and that presumably comes from the earliest bicycles where you pushed the ground with your feet. Riding definitely seems a better term for that than driving. I guess you can say that the language came along for the ride as technology developed (sorry!).
That’s probably because the train’s floor level is normally higher than the platform, so you are literally getting down from the train.
In Indian English you can also detrain, which you certainly wouldn’t do in Australian English.
In Australian English, you’d seldom get down from the train any more (unless it’s a piece of playground equipment), because the train floor and the platform are almost always level these days. You would instead get off the train, but you could also exit the train or even disembark (typically used as an intransitive verb). You don’t normally get out of the train, for some reason.
Disembark is one of those words that appears only in certain contexts. Any official announcement is going to use disembark or alight preferentially to leave or get off, but almost no one would use them in normal speech. (Here in Ireland, anyway.)
Interestingly enough, in Sydney, one can alight a train or a tram, yet they set off when they get off a bus. But I think set off is on the way out now and won't survive for long.
I hope it would be alight from a train or tram? As for “setting off”, how is that used in a sentence (with what subject and object)? In Victoria, the bus (or driver) could set you down or let you off, is that the structure you’re talking about? “Set off” has long been used in English to describe when you get underway on a journey (“and so we set off on our journey”).
When I was writing my original comment I first wrote "alight a train", but did some research and found "alight from a train" to be more common. I think it's fine to omit "from", however. We wouldn't be the first people to do it.
I wonder if it's something related to the sense of isolation that might be felt in this group of Cubans in South Florida. My ex was from Miami, and both her and her family felt they were largely on their own, both nationally and internationally. Case in point, whenever she travelled overseas, and mentioned her Cuban heritage, there was usually something complementary said about the Cuban revolution or revolutionary leaders there - which upset her and her family and kind of led to them feeling like they were overlooked.
I don't think this constitutes a dialect. It's not distinct enough from Standard English. Believe me, I've been to Miami plenty of times, and I've heard the typical "spanglish," it was fascinating to hear a group of friends rapidly and fluently switching between English and Spanish. But the English and Spanish were distinct. And the two languages are similar enough in their structure that when things get calqued there is often little to no loss of meaning.
Hinglish, which is a language I've learned (well, I learned Hindi and I grew up speaking English) is a radically different dialect of English. Hindi, like Spanish, is also in a lot of ways very similar to English. But there are enough differences where the logic of the language, when used by Hindi speakers, changes enough that in order to understand the meaning of any given phrase one often needs to know both Hindi and English, even if all the words used are English. What one must understand is, all English words are part of the lexicon of Hindi (as are all Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic words--in fact, alongside the major South Asian literary languages, any language spoken in the region where one is speaking Hindi is a language that loan-words are pulled from. Hindi is more a framework than anything else), such that you can speak Hindi only using English words, and its still basically Hindi. If you don't know Hindi, even if you know every word, you might not understand the meaning of the sentence.
I understand the impetus but linguists for whatever reason are oftentimes politically motivated in this sort of social-justic-y, milquetoast liberal progressive way that stretches the limits of what can and should be rigorously defined as a dialect. AAVE is a real dialect, and there are many different registers of English in the world. I really don't think this rises to that level.
Here in Norway, we just call any regional language difference dialectal (unless of course you get to call it a different language, cf. above link). That takes away the need to argue about how much linguistic difference is needed for two dialects to be considered separate or why the difference occurred or whether it's "correct grammar" – if people speak their language differently because they're from different places, that's a dialectal difference. (Anyone who speaks a language thus speaks a dialect of that language.) Simple, but rigorous. There's no value judgement, it's just a factual description.
We (in Norway) also recognise that it is not really discrete. In school we learned about the different dialectical traits (like palatalisation, different versions of “r” as well as morphological and lexical differences) and the different areas have which trait. We would listen to speech samples and identify where they are from by recognising traits and computing intersections.
We would also learn about how language and dialects evolve over time and compare how old people in our local area talk with how young people talk.
> But there are enough differences where the logic of the language, when used by Hindi speakers, changes enough that in order to understand the meaning of any given phrase one often needs to know both Hindi and English, even if all the words used are English
I speak both German and Turkish fluently and for the most cases, I "understand only the train station" ("nur Bahnhof verstehen" means that you understand nothing) when Germans of Turkish origin communicate with each other in German-Turkish, and it's been 14 years since I came here, so I have no hope of ever understanding it.
Those languages tend to evolve apart from both of the origins towards asymmetric intelligibility.
> I understand the impetus but linguists for whatever reason are oftentimes politically motivated in this sort of social-justic-y, milquetoast liberal progressive way that stretches the limits of what can and should be rigorously defined as a dialect.
Well that escalated quickly. People defining dialects because of their political agenda? Anything touches, regardless of positivity, to minorities and people shout SJW!
> Well that escalated quickly. People defining dialects because of their political agenda? Anything touches, regardless of positivity, to minorities and people shout SJW!
This has been going on for a while: "I disagree with an recognized expert (linguists) on a fundamental concept (definition of dialect) based on my rather singular experience (or youtube research) so those experts must be 'woke' and I will now become enraged!"
>This has been going on for a while: "I disagree with an recognized expert (linguists) on a fundamental concept (definition of dialect) based on my rather singular experience (or youtube research) so those experts must be 'woke' and I will now become enraged!"
This is worse than Scientism. I'm not going to lay out my credentials for you, I'll just say that most "woke" shit dovetails heavily with far-right ethnonationalism, which I elucidated elsewhere (since you might not know that most cuban-americans are politically aligned with the far-right), and I have no patience for white-liberals, or liberals in general, who go around whining about identity politics without any real social critique.
> People defining dialects because of their political agenda?
That is absolutely the case with mainland China where the CCP has weaponised the dialects rhetoric and declared all other Chinese languages that are not Mandarin as mere, lowly dialects despite then being closely related, yet different languages and comprising a larger Chinese language continuum. They have their own respective grammatical and, naturally, lexicon differences.
Such an attitude is also partially rooted in the history of the development of linguistics in ancient China where it was not recognised as such until the encounter with the linguistic studies in neighbouring ancient India as part of the inevitable cultural exchange, but the western style development of linguistics was always stifled in ancient China due to the «celestial kingdom» concept (i.e. no need to learn barbarian tongues).
Predominantly Mandarin speaking young generation (mostly from the north) get a surprise or a few when they 1) come across another Chinese language in writing (officially, it is not meant to exist), 2) realise that the grammar of another Chinese language is incomprehensible to them. It becomes an eye opener to them.
The reality is a bit different, as almost everything in the mainland, and most children are bi- or trilingual if they happen to have been born into a family where parents speak at least one other Chinese language. In between peers, they speak their own language reverting to Mandarin when speaking to a person not native to their region.
The Taiwanese have eventually got it right, and officially recognise Hokkien as a distinct language and now teach it in school as well as fund the Hokkien studies. Hong Kong and Cantonese are somewhat a grey area at the moment, although Cantonese itself is thriving nevertheless.
>Anything touches, regardless of positivity, to minorities and people shout SJW!
Well, Cuban-Americans are mostly white and they tend to be members of the far-right, so, it makes sense that a bunch of white liberal social-justice types would support them since the only metric they care about is "diversity." Not to mention, of course, that there is no such thing as a "cuban" ethnicity, Cuba is as ethnically diverse as the United States, probably moreso, its just that the majority of those who fled were the rich white population, which naturally supported anti-communist policies when they came to the US.
This is an impressively long comment that adds no value. It has some long tangent about Hindi that not relevant to the point (is there a point here?), and then engages in some politically motivated whining about linguists.
I don't know, maybe you just got dumped by a linguist?
You differentiate between Spanglish and Hinglish because a native English speaker wouldn't understand the English parts of Hinglish (but they would understand the English parts of Hinglish)?
Spanish is so far close to English in so many aspects, because English grammar is so heavily influenced by French (which is why French and Spanish are easier for English speakers to learn than German, even though German and English are technically both members of the same language family). If someone took a Spanish sentence and overlaid every single word with its English equivalent, 95% of the time it would be intelligible to a native English speaker. On the other hand, if one did the same thing for Hindi, it would almost certainly be unintelligible unless someone already knew the "framework" of the grammar of Hindi, in which case they'd interpret it properly. I never once been unable to communicate in Hindi, since I already know all the vocabulary I need.
Well then doesn't every major metro area in the United States have its own dialect? How is this "emerging"? It's probably been like this for centuries.
What's "emerging" here is that anyone in the media now wants to mention this particular dialect for political reasons. The title of the author is: "Race + Equity Editor". Why divide people over something so subtle? It's not that unusual. There is no such thing as a common American English for this to be distinct from.
It hasn’t been like this for centuries, that’s the entire point. This migration pattern from Cuba to Miami is a relatively recent change (which happened for, you know, “political reasons”) and this is an effect of that change.
All of this is fascinating and it’s intertwined with race. I don’t understand why we should be prohibited fromfrom talking about it.
No mention of what I'd say is one of the more common cases of this "dialect", one I find myself using despite speaking only English: careful your head/hand/whatever.
Not sure I buy it, never really heard any of the rest of the stuff they say in the article except maybe from old people who are second language English speakers. Careful your head though I heard quite a bit.
That and the fact that it seems to mostly be a few set phrases make me suspicious.
"Get down the car" sounds like a transliteration of "bajar del carro". "Bajar" has various connotations, one is to "get off" a car, another is to "descend".
"I made the line to pay for groceries." sounds like a transliteration of "Hice la fila para pagar los abarrotes".
"Carne" means meat but it often means beef specifically.
In French: "Descendre de la voiture" - in English, that would be "Step down from the car"... And that makes sense when considering that said vehicle was initially a horse-drawn carriage (-> "car"), which were typically high.
"Meat or chicken" is also quite common in parts of UK South Asian culture, e.g. many lower-rent "Indian" (usually Bangladeshi or Pakistani) restaurants in England will offer a choice of chicken or meat curry, where "meat" could be lamb, mutton, goat or who knows what.
There's no standard definition of when something becomes a dialect or even its own language, so arguing about that is kind of moot.
That said, I'm not terribly impressed that there seem to be some Spanish calques in certain Englishes. That seems rather expected and similar things happen all over the world (with different language pairs). I mean, this can still be fun to investigate, but the article makes it sound as if it's something totally out of the ordinary happening.
If we had evidence of actual grammatical shifts, that would be more interesting, but that doesn't appear to be the case here.
So I read this and with the examples given are not new as I myself have heard people talking like this in South Texas, it’s called Tejano English or sometimes Chicano English, which has to be quite old at this point.
They’re maybe some specifics to Miami that are unique but the examples given in the article are not.
> During this period, more than 10,000 loanwords from French entered the English language, mostly in domains where the aristocracy held sway: the arts, military, medicine, law and religion.
One interesting aspect where this is very visible in the english language is meat-related language.
Raw food and animals words, butchered by the common people have mostly germanic/saxon roots that have nothing in common with french words, e.g. lamb, chicken, pork, beef, etc.
But cooked/processed meat has mostly french-derived words: sausage, charcuterie, cutlet, fillet, grill, sirloin, roast, stew..
I think you mixed up the words a little, pork and beef are of French origin, compare with modern French porc and bœuf, the germanic words are pig and cow.
There are also some words derived from French but pronounced in a very non-French manner. The t in valet should be fully pronounced. Making the word sound French is a non-U hypercorrection.
> Making the word sound French is a non-U hypercorrection.
I disagree that pronouncing it "VALLay" is hypercorrection. Proper French pronunciation would be "vallAY" (with the emphasis on the second syllable).
At any rate, my language background is upper-middle-class English English, and nobody pronounced the word "valitt". That's an americanism, as far as I'm concerned. As a consequence, I've always struggled with the word when used to mean cleaning e.g. a car interior.
FWIW, I understand that the "U and non-U" thing was meant as a joke, was horribly snobbish, and was anchored in a particular stratum of early 20th-C English society.
In German something similar developed through immigrants from Turkey or Russia. There is a German wikipedia article about it [1]. In particular a kind of distinct dialect developed in Berlin[2]
Interesting. There are similar unconventional grammars in use by English speakers of Cajun descent in Southern Louisiana (“put groceries up” instead of “put groceries away”).
Cajun English sloshes over into East Texas and beyond, because I, daughter of an East Texan who grew up in Central Texas now living in Germany, often tell my bilingual toddler, “no, no, Mommy needs to put up the groceries first!”
1. "We got out of the car and went inside." Possibly also "We got out of the car and came inside", but only if the speaker is still currently inside.
2. "I joined the line ...", although being British I'd be more likely to say "I joined the queue to pay for the shopping", so maybe get an American to double-check this one!
3. "He had a party ..." - I think "make" is used more rarely in English as an auxiliary verb than other languages, typically we "have" or "do" things.
"We got out of the car and went inside", "I joined the queue to pay for groceries", "He had/held/put-on a party to celebrate [...]".
I wouldn't describe my versions as "correct", but all of the renditions you've offered look to me as if they should be spoken with an accent not from England.
This is very cool, and I hope the dialect isn’t defeated by prescriptivism. Somehow — and I can’t trace exactly how — my public school education removed most of the dialect that I had when I started; I feel this is a shame since I’m fond of how my grandparents speak.
Spanish is also changing, "te llamo para atrás" is used a lot, it means I will call you back.It translates word by word in Spanish, I will call you for behind, but it is now used a lot by the Spanish speaking population in the US.
