2.1 Diglossia, assimilation, and bilingualism among the hispanics  (Page 11/17)

          The third requirement is the amplitude of functions. There is a generalized agreement among sociolinguists that the basic function that a hybrid and interfered language like Spanglish must reach to become a true language. It has been said that commercial languages rarely become maternal languages; not the Creoles whose morphologic and syntactic structure are characterized for being the maternal language of the group. The extension of functions of a hybrid language can be the result of an administrative decision, as is the case of the Papiamento of Curazao or the Creole of Haiti which, by political decision, covers the fields of education, religion, and literature in speech and writing. But it is clear that today this is not the case of Spanglish that, with a lacking of administrative and political support, it is limited to be an intra-ethnic slang of the emphatic communication within an ethnic group. Of course, the functional expansion reinforces the stability of the linguistic forms as much as the feeling of loyalty toward the language interfered as a language different from any other. And, finally, there is the requirement of the classification of the speakers, which is nothing but the emergency of a conscience linguistic and a feeling of fidelity to the new language. Both things depend on socio-cultural factors like the vindication of the hybrid language in the list of ethnic offenses and geographic factors; like the great physical distance of a group in relation to the monolingual surroundings of where one of the two languages come from. Both factors are absent in the case of Spanglish. Within the Chicano movement, one of ethnic vindications has been the Spanish language, of course, the Spanish of the U.S., but not Spanglish. On the other hand, the physical distance of the espanglishized in relation to Mexico or Cuba or Puerto Rico is not relevant, especially if that distance is computed based on the time spent to cross it. All it means is that Mexico, like Cuba and Puerto Rico, are an inevitable linguistic referent that reinforces loyalty toward Spanish and inhibits the feeling of fidelity toward Spanglish.

           The process of formation of the Spanglish as a new American language is in a virtual phase where the potentialities are more than the facts. Meanwhile, Spanglish is an internal language that works with the object of transmitting empathy and solidarity between certain segments of an ethnic group. What is more worrisome is that Spanglish was a transitional phase in the process of acquisition of the English language. A transitional phase that does not go anywhere because it is a phase of stagnation and fossilization of the languages, as it was said in the epigraph Diglossia without Bilingualism (2003), in the introduction of its Spanglish orbit, recognizes that the North American assimilationists, as well as the Latin conservationists, ruthlessly criticize a slang that is not but the result of stagnation of the Latinos in the process of learning the English language. For the first group there would be a resulting chaos of failed bilingual education and dangerous multicultural programs that celebrate the mestizo as ulitimate. For the seconds group, it would be a trap and a shame that, while other immigrant groups have been able to integrate themselves to the American way of life, Hispanics have shown an obstinate resistance to follow the same path. Stavans (2003) agreed that everybody correctly speaks Spanish, English, and Spanglish, since his espanglishized children speak all three languages. Spanglish, as a free option, as an intellectual curiosity to practice the “constructive analysis,” as Stavans said, or as a simple form to earning a living, is good. But Spanglish as a destiny is a mouse trap, in which an important sector of the Hispanic population is caught. Stavans knew that although the control of the English language is not a sufficient condition for the social ascent in the U.S.; nevertheless, it continues being a necessary condition because without it, nobody grants an individual the opportunity for a job interview.