I have been asked often these days about a recent study on a form of Spanish-influenced English that has emerged in Miami. It is by the linguist Phillip Carter at Florida International University, assisted by Kristen D\u2019Alessandro Merii.<\/p>\n
Miami is highly bilingual; in some neighborhoods, 90 percent of households use Spanish daily. But more interesting, perhaps, are the ways in which many Spanish-English bilinguals use expressions in English that are modeled on Spanish. It\u2019s as if they are sometimes speaking English \u201cin Spanish.\u201d This is true not only of those whose first language was Spanish, but of second- and third-generation bilinguals, too.<\/p>\n
In this Miami English, for instance, you say \u201cget down from the car\u201d rather than \u201cget out of it,\u201d because this is how you would put it in Spanish: bajarse del carro. You \u201cmake\u201d a party instead of \u201cthrowing\u201d it for the same reason. (In Spanish, it\u2019s hacer una fiesta.) And you get married \u201cwith\u201d instead of \u201cto\u201d someone because in Spanish one says \u201ccasarse con\u201d rather than \u201ccasarse a.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Carter\u2019s study is also a useful demonstration of the typical although perhaps counterintuitive way in which languages gently alter one another. Our usual sense of a language is of something \u201cpure\u201d and unadulterated. When other languages stage incursions into one we know, we often process them along a continuum from amusement (Louisiana\u2019s mock-French \u201cLaissez les bons temps rouler!\u201d for \u201cLet the good times roll\u201d) through perplexity (\u201cWhy are<\/em> there so many French words in English?\u201d) to even contempt. I once knew a Romanian who found something unseemly and even louche in the fact that his language \u2014 a Romance one related to Italian \u2014 had taken in so many Slavic words.<\/p>\n But just as human beings might think it\u2019s strange that animals walk on four legs when in fact it is bipedalism that is unusual, languages mixing together is the default, not a special case. Where lots of people are bilingual \u2014 such as in Miami \u2014 languages will almost always exchange words. And more than that, they will often also start to put words together in similar ways.<\/p>\n For example, one thing an English speaker typically has to unlearn when mastering a foreign language is the way we strand prepositions at the ends of sentences: \u201cThis is the house we went to.\u201d Calls to avoid this practice \u2014 who among us did not learn in school to \u201cnever end a sentence with a preposition\u201d? \u2014 have been silly and useless. (Cue here the possibly apocryphal anecdote about Winston Churchill\u2019s verdict on the rule: \u201cThis is the type of errant pedantry up with which I shall not put!\u201d) However, in other languages the rule is a real one. To make the similarly structured statement in Spanish, \u201cEsta es la casa que yo fui a,\u201d could practically get you fined. No pedant needs to warn people against it, as no native speaker would ever be inclined to say it. It simply isn\u2019t Spanish on any level.<\/p>\n However, things are different in, say, Copenhagen. Danish, and its sister languages Swedish and Norwegian, happily strand prepositions in the same way English does. For \u201cThis is the house we went to,\u201d the Dane says, \u201cDette er huset vi gik til.\u201d All you have to know is that \u201ctil\u201d means \u201cto.\u201d<\/p>\n The reason that preposition stranding is happening in London, Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm but not in Paris, Madrid or Moscow is that Scandinavian Vikings invaded Britain starting in the eighth century C.E. It is commonly noted that they left behind hundreds of words in the language, such as \u201cskirt,\u201d \u201cill,\u201d \u201cegg\u201d and \u201chappy.\u201d But they also left ways<\/em> of putting things, such as stranded prepositions. Before the Vikings came, no Old English speaker would have been caught dead stranding prepositions. But after the Vikings, in many ways English was spoken \u201cin Viking.\u201d<\/p>\n The Miami story, then, is a modern version of what happened to English in the Middle Ages, except this time the language is Spanish rather than Danish or Norwegian.<\/p>\n I encountered another variation on this theme <\/strong>during my annual stay at a Jewish summer bungalow colony. Why me? Long story, but it started during the pandemic and became a habit, and I am one of many non-Jews there. It\u2019s called Rosmarins Cottages, and it is one of the last Reform Jewish colonies of a kind of which there were once dozens in the Catskills \u2014 immortalized in the film \u201cDirty Dancing\u201d and, more recently, on the wondrous television series \u201cThe Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.\u201d<\/p>\n At Rosmarins, I get an earful of what happens to English when it is spoken alongside yet another language, Yiddish. Of course, most people don\u2019t walk around the place thinking of themselves as speaking Yiddishisms. But if you listen closely, you can hear how Yiddish infiltrated the English of earlier American Jews, such that it now seasons the speech of people a generation or more removed from actually speaking Yiddish.<\/p>\n For example, at Rosmarins, one says that one will be eating \u201cby\u201d someone\u2019s bungalow later, not \u201cat\u201d it, e.g., \u201cWe\u2019re going to be by Lenore\u2019s. Are you coming?\u201d This \u201cby\u201d is taken from the way Yiddish uses its word \u201cbey\u201d: \u201cI am at grandpa and grandma\u2019s house\u201d is \u201cIkh bin bey zeyde aun bobe\u2019s hoyz.\u201d Just as Miami English is used by people who mostly speak English, at Rosmarins all but a sliver of the people using \u201cby\u201d this way do not speak Yiddish. Even the non-Jewish bungaleers (yes, that\u2019s the term) come to use it. I and another gentile resident were using it just the other day without a second thought.<\/p>\n A while ago another resident and I were trying to find the light switch when leaving a big barn of a building. The resident, a lifelong English speaker who does not speak Yiddish but had relatives who did, found the switch and said, \u201cOh, I found where to close that light.\u201d That was modeled on Yiddish, in which one could put it the same way and say, \u201cmakh tsi de likht.\u201d<\/p>\n Or, to go back in time a little, there was \u2014 of course \u2014 a 1950s Broadway musical about a Jewish bungalow colony. It was called \u201cWish You Were Here\u201d and was a minor hit. The colony\u2019s social director introduced himself with a song, set to a klezmer-like tune, in one stanza of which he sang about how his parents and older relatives hated that he had decided to become a social director. He imitates them:<\/p>\n Oh, woe, woe, woe!<\/em><\/p>\n A social director! A social director!<\/em><\/p>\n Don\u2019t tell us our boy is a social director!<\/em><\/p>\n Let him be a loafer, let him be a bum.<\/em><\/p>\n Anything is better than our boy he should become<\/em><\/p>\n A social director!!!<\/em><\/p>\n I have always liked the line \u201cAnything is better than our boy he should become,\u201d because this is how the sentence would be put in Yiddish as well, and the parents of this Jewish man of 1952 would most likely have been Yiddish speakers. One often reads and hears similar phrasing in literary and dramatic depictions of Jewish people of that era.<\/p>\n So: The house we \u201cwent to,\u201d the light we \u201cclosed,\u201d the person we are married \u201cwith\u201d \u2014 all of these are examples of what happened to English as it met other languages. And of course the reverse happens to the other languages at the same time. The Spanglish phenomenon is well known, in which Spanish in America has taken on a great many English words and ways of putting things. \u201cLlamame pa\u2019atras\u201d in Spanglish is \u201ccall me back,\u201d despite the fact that in original Spanish it would mean \u201ccall me backward.\u201d Little wonder that this evolution works in both directions. Engla\u00f1ol, anyone?<\/p>\n As Carter put it in an interview, \u201cWhen you have two languages spoken by most of the population, you\u2019re going to have a lot of interesting language contact happening.\u201d In other words, the new Miami English is a cool example of an utterly ordinary phenomenon.<\/p>\n John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of \u201cNine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever\u201d and, most recently, \u201cWoke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.\u201d<\/p>\n