2.1 Diglossia, assimilation, and bilingualism among the hispanics  (Page 10/17)

Therefore, the future of Spanglish is not written. As Uriel Weinreich (1974) says, “the interferences caused by situations of contact between languages have produced new languages in some cases” (P. 220). Thus, the commercial slang, maybe with the exception of Chinook Jargon (language of the children of the Franc-Canadian travelers with the Indians of the Oregon territory), rarely became maternal languages of a group, whereas the languages of the Creoles and pidgins deserve to be considered as new languages. And continuing with the subject at matter, Weinreich himself thinks that the speech forms arise from the contact of languages with the English language, like the English Hawaiian dialect or the Americanized Italian of the U.S.:

they do not seem to have reached the form stability or the amplitude of functions, nor the distance necessary with respect to the base language, nor have they created differentiating subjective attitudes that are sufficiently great to be called new languages in the authentic sense of the word (1974, p. 221).

            Therefore, before answering the question if Spanglish will replace the Spanish language someday, we would first have to determine if Spanglish, as a risen form of speech of the interferences of the contact between Spanish and English, has the status of a language. The first requirement that Spanglish must fulfill is to show that its lexicon, morphology, and syntax has a degree of sufficient differentiation with respect to the two languages of which it comes from in order to be classified as a new language. This exclusively linguistic determinant demands a rigorous and comparative analysis of structure of the languages at issue. With all cautions taken, at this moment, we suspect that Spanglish does not fulfill the requirement of differentiation. The second requirement that Spanglish must fulfill is the stability of its linguistic forms, phonetic, lexical, and morfo-syntactical. It is about analyzing to what extent the guidelines of interference between English and Spanish become habitual and fix into the conscience of the Spanglish speaker because, among others things, of the ineffectiveness of the linguistic controls that tend to eliminate these interferences. Many of the present languages, according to Murat Roberts, mentioned by Weinreich (1974), in circumstances of “little prestige” on behalf of the original languages, have crystallized what prevented them to exert the norm function and to practice, consequently, the linguistic control of the interferences and deviations. I do not believe this is the case of Spanish or English, the two modern languages of communication that watch over the tolerable levels of standardization through diverse mechanisms, conciliating that of the “minimum variation in the form with the maximum variation in the function.” On the other hand, Spanish speakers, as much as English speakers, have a high degree of linguistic conscience and loyalty to their own language; unless they are independently purist, conservatives, or innovators, they do not hide their surprise before the provoking forms of Spanglish. Forms that do not present the minimum stability required by a language become divergent and unpredictable when they cross national or social class barriers.