Sunday, October 28, 2007

Lg. variety

Growing up in Park City, there are a lot of hispanics in a nearby neighborhood. Working at different restaraunts over the years has allowed me to communicate with them. For some reason I always immediately take to them and try and speak in Spanish. They in return try to learn more english. Some of the bussers and are also hispanic and can tell they speak spanglish. I think that it is a form of slang in the fact that they are taking two standard languages and intertwining them. They aren't necessarily forming a new language just mixing two. BEV is similar, they are using the standard engish but adding and twisting the words to communicate in their own way. The weird part most english terms that our society use come from other countries. I think that languages may form eventually from slang. For now since most language use stems from standard english, spanglish, konglish, etc. are only slang.

2 comments:

Tiffany said...

Amanda,

Where did you learn Spanish? Did you learn it through school and then practice it?

I'm curious about how you define slang? I typically think of it as words in a given language, not the syntax or structure of it. Are the speakers of Spanglish that you work with changing structure too, or just words?

Tiffany

jake.richens said...

Working in restaurants gives me a little insight on what you go through. I worked at Cafe Peirpont for 6months which was way too long! Reguardless I feel that when I would talk to the cooks/dishwashers I was speaking more spanglish slang than than english, it definetly wasn't another language variety.