Spanglish in the US, Belize and Gibraltar: On the Importance of Comparative Research

Abstract

Even though it has been previously suggested that Spanglish is not exclusive to the US, research on this sociolinguistic phenomenon has focused on the US Hispanophone context, thus providing a limited understanding of how the US compares to Belize and Gibraltar, two language contact situations where Spanglish is also attested. This paper fills this gap by bringing together insights from scholarship on these three contexts where Spanish has been in prolonged contact with English. To this end, this article highlights some of the key debates and discussions regarding Spanglish. It also introduces the reader to some similarities between the US, Belize and Gibraltar and posits that there are Spanglish phenomena, which necessarily entail the reevaluation of the role that structural hybridity plays in Spanglish. Lastly, through an overview of comparative analyses that have been conducted more recently, we illustrate the importance of this work in elucidating our knowledge of the remarkable patterns of uniformity and variability that characterize the dynamic nature of Spanglish varieties in different parts of the world today.

1. Introduction

Although research on Spanglish begun more than fifty years ago (Nash, 1970), it has remained US-centric, self-evident from the prolific scholarship that has been conducted in Puerto Rico and metropolitan cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, historically known for their large Latino populations. In contrast, other non-US contexts where Spanish is also in contact with English are mentioned only in passing or even entirely ignored. Lipski (2008, p. 54), for instance, points out that Gibraltar in the Iberian Peninsula is a speech community that “closely mirrors that of many parts of the United States.” Casielles-Suárez (2017, p. 150) clarifies in a footnote that whereas Spanglish has other names in the US (i.e., Tex-Mex, Pocho, Nuyorican, Cubonics, Pachuco or Caló), it is known as “Llanito” in Gibraltar. López García-Molins (2022, p. 43) asserts that Spanglish embodies a linguistic performance that develops in some bilingual US contexts as well as in Gibraltar “or anywhere else Spanish and English live side by side”. This “anywhere else” includes Belize, a Central American context that has been conspicuously absent thus far in discussions regarding Spanglish. Despite the acknowledgement among several scholars that Spanglish is not exclusive to the US, the Royal Spanish Academy maintains that it is only attested among certain groups of Hispanics in the US (RAE, 2014). This paper sheds light on Spanglish by contextualizing previous debates and discussions vis-à-vis cross-community research that has been conducted in two lesser studied contexts, namely Belize, where Spanish has been in contact with English since the early 1800s (Balam & Baird, in press), and Gibraltar, where Spanish has been in contact with English since the 1700s (Bermejo, 2025; Levey, 2015; Moyer, 1992; Rodríguez García, 2022). The article is divided as follows: in Section 2 and Section 3, we elaborate on the definition and stigmatization of Spanglish; in Section 4, we outline some issues that have been contested in antecedent work; in Section 5, we introduce the reader to some similarities between the US, Belize, and Gibraltar; in Section 6, we highlight insights that have been gained through the study of Spanglish from a comparative lens, particularly as it relates to cross-community studies on code-switching; lastly, in Section 7, we offer concluding remarks.

2. Spanglish as an Umbrella Term

In the early 20th century, Espinosa (1917/1975, p. 104) documented both lexical borrowings from English (e.g., breca ‘brake’, troca ‘truck’, etc.) and Spanish/English code-switching in New Mexico, as in (1), a language contact phenomenon which he labeled as ‘speech mixture’ (for relevant discussion, see Benson, 2001). It wasn’t until 1948, however, that the term ‘Spanglish’, coined by Salvador Tío, first appeared in a newspaper column in Puerto Rico (Zentella, 2016).

(1)	Vamos ir al foot-ball game y después al baile a tener the time of our lives
	‘Let’s go to the football game and afterwards to the dance to have the time of our lives.’

Nash (1970) is the first scholar who objectively investigated Spanglish by analyzing its use among Puerto Ricans and Newyoricans in the US. She posited that Spanglish constitutes three types of linguistic phenomena: namely, (i) lexical borrowings from English (e.g., coffee break); (ii) phonologically adapted words (e.g., catchear ‘to catch’); and (iii) calques, syntactic idioms, and new Spanish words or phrases that emerge due to contact with English (e.g., llamar pa’tras ‘to call back’ = volver a llamar).

While Nash proposed that Spanglish was inclusive only of lexical items that contributed to a process of relexification, some scholars in more recent work advance that Spanglish is a more general term that encompasses borrowings, calques, and semantic extensions as well as Spanish/English code-switching, as

Table 1. Language contact phenomena that characterize Spanglish.

Adapted from Rothman and Rell (2005, pp. 520–524)	Adapted from Sayer (2008, pp. 97–103)	Adapted from Casielles-Suárez (2017, pp. 151–152) 1
(a) Adaptation of lexical units or phrasal constituents: (morpho)phonological e.g., lunchear ‘to eat lunch’ (=almorzar) (b) Adaptation of lexical units or phrasal constituents: semantic e.g., realizar ‘to realize’ (=darse cuenta) (c) Code-switching or rule-governed amalgamation of two languages: syntax e.g., Creí que María always told the truth ‘I thought María always told the truth.’	(a) Loan words e.g., troca ‘truck’ (=camioneta); parquear ‘to park’ (=estacionar) (b) Calques e.g., Luego vino pa’atrás ‘Then he returned.’ (=regresar, volver) (c) Code-switching e.g., Ya no tengo the key ‘Now I don’t have the key.’	(a) Borrowings e.g., suiche ‘switch’ (=interruptor) (b) Calques or loan translations e.g., llamar pa’tras ‘to call back’ (=devolver una llamada) (c) Semantic extensions e.g., carpeta ‘carpet’ (=alfombra) (d) Code-switching e.g., His cousin Pedro Pablo sucked his teeth with exaggerated disdain. Esto aquí es un maldito infierno ‘This here is a damn hell.’ (e) Code-mixing: inside phrase e.g., Esos giant porteño mosquitos ‘Those giant mosquitos from Buenos Aires.’

¹ Examples in Casielles-Suárez (2017) are from different sources: (a) from Sánchez (1983, p. 124); (d) from Díaz (2007, p. 275) and (e) from Chávez-Silverman (2004, p. 65).

shows (also see Lipski, 2015, p. 669). Although there are multiple views with regard to the linguistic nature of Spanglish, it is agreed upon that whereas borrowings, calques, and semantic extensions may be found in the speech of monolingual Spanish speakers (for further discussion, see Montes-Alcalá, 2018, pp. 322–324), code-switching requires some degree of competence in both languages (Pfaff, 1979). As Table 1 illustrates, code-switching occurs when languages are alternated either within or between sentences, while the term code-mixing is sometimes used to refer specifically to switching within a phrase.

Since the 1970s, Spanglish started to be used as a more general term that referred to the mixing of Spanish and English (Zamora, 2008; Zentella, 1981), and there are many scholars today that use the terms Spanglish and code-switching interchangeably (e.g., Bermejo, 2025; Fairclough, 2003; Zentella, 2016, 2017). The inclusion of code-switching is imperative to any definition of Spanglish as it has implications for the arguments postulated either in favor or against the use of this term. Consider, for example, Otheguy and Stern (2010), whose paper on Spanglish focuses on the speech of first- and second-generation US Latinos. While Otheguy and Stern concentrate on borrowings and calques, there is no coverage of Spanish/English code-switching, which is notably incongruent with the well-known fact that second-generation US Latinos in particular engage in the combination or alternation of Spanish and English (see Pew Research Center, 2023, p. 14). Thus, a key aspect of their linguistic behavior is Spanish/English code-switching.

The narrow focus on borrowings and calques, referred to as ‘anglicisms’ by philologists, is problematic because it denies bilinguals from a comprehensive evaluation of their speech practices and contributes to what Zentella (2016, 2017) fittingly describes as the trivialization and depreciation of speakers’ bilingual skills, which are in fact dynamic and complex, as this paper will show. Furthermore, Spanglish speakers themselves typically refer to code-switching when they use the term. Chicana author and activist Gloria Anzaldúa, for instance, underlines that Tex-Mex or Spanglish, which comes most naturally to her, occurs when “[she] switche[s] back and forth from English to Spanish in the same sentence or in the same word” (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 37). Thus, Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of Spanglish includes code-switching, but may also comprise language mixing at the word level. In line with Casielles-Suárez (2017), Rothman and Rell (2005), and Sayer (2008), I take Spanglish to be an umbrella term that more broadly refers to “the language contact phenomena that naturally arise when Spanish and English, two historically influential global languages, are thrust into intense contact as a result of colonization, annexation, and/or immigration” (Balam & Shelton, 2023, p. 36).

3. The Stigmatization of Spanglish

From its inception, Spanglish has been a highly contentious and politicized term that has generated fervent attacks on this sociolinguistic phenomenon. Whereas in the mid-20th century Salvador Tío disparaged Spanglish as “[the] degradation and impoverishment of the glorious tongue of Cervantes” (Nash, 1970, p. 231), Spain-born author Carlos Varo described it as a chronic illness (Varo, 1971). Mexican poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz later described it as “just abominable” (cited in Stavans, 2000, p. 555). Piña-Rosales argues that Spanglish is a social problem that is typically found among immigrants in the US who have low levels of education (cited in Zentella, 2017, p. 32). Other avid detractors like González-Echevarría (1997) argue that Spanglish is an invasion of Spanish by English and a capitulation to English (cited in López García-Molins, 2022, p. 75). Although coverage on Spanglish has recently become more neutral or even positive (see, for example, Nagovitch, 2024), it is noteworthy that academics and educators have historically fostered the most negative attitudes towards Spanglish (for relevant discussion, see Dumitrescu, 2010). Zentella (2017, p. 36) underscores that Spanish language academies, particularly the North American Academy of the Spanish Language, have aided and abetted the Royal Spanish Academy’s goal of promoting “destructive” linguistic ideologies. In its stated mission since 1713 to “clean, fix, and give splendor” to the Spanish language, the Royal Spanish Academy has maintained “colonial policing practices” that have perpetuated negative stereotypes of Spanglish and its speakers (Zentella, 2017, p. 21). It is not surprising, therefore, that when the Royal Spanish Academy first included ‘espanglish’ in its official dictionary in 2014, it described it as the deformation of lexical and grammatical elements of both Spanish and English.

4. Contrasting Views Regarding Spanglish

Lipski (2008) posits that much of the controversy regarding Spanglish is the result of misleading or erroneous information. For instance, Mexican-born Stavans’ (2003) pseudo-Spanglish translation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote contains bilingual syntactic violations and odd phonetic word combinations that reinforce the idea that Spanglish is used by uneducated people. Others take Mock Spanish (i.e., the humorous yet derogatory use of pseudo-Spanish words or phrases in popular American culture such as no problemo: Hill, 1998) to be representative of Spanglish. In Lipski’s view, the label is a catchphrase that refers to many distinct yet inaccurately described language contact phenomena, which ultimately render the term meaningless (for similar view, see Dumitrescu, 2010).

The notion of Inverted Spanglish relates to the connection that is sometimes made between Mock Spanish and Spanglish. Inverted Spanglish takes place when US Latinos appropriate Mock Spanish either for jovial play or to parody the speech of Whites (Rosa, 2016). For example, they may employ hyper-anglicized pronunciation of Spanish insults (e.g., ‘pendayho’ for pendejo ‘dumbass’) or Spanish words or phrases in English-dominant interactions (e.g., ‘numerow trace’ for número tres ‘number three’) to display their linguistic mastery and cultural knowledge of both Spanish and English. This allows them to challenge negative perceptions of their language proficiency by both Spanish and English speakers.

More importantly, Inverted Spanglish allows speakersto downplay their national origin differences and highlight a shared US Latino identity that entails a deliberate distancing from both whiteness and a monolingual Spanish identity. The idea of Inverted Spanglish can be analyzed as indicative that our understanding of Spanglish continues to evolve as we study the different ways in which US Latinos linguistically enact their hybrid identities, much in the same way that the conceptualization of other controversial terms like ‘code-switching’ and ‘Translanguaging’ have continuously developed over the past decades (for an overview, see Balam, 2021).

Despite the pivotal link that exists between Spanglish and the hybrid identities of US Latinos, Otheguy and Stern (2010) maintain that the label Spanglish is misleading, unnecessary, and harmful. They underscore that features that characterize popular varieties of Spanish in the US are analogous to those in Latin America and Spain. Furthermore, structural hybridity is not a central element of US Spanish, which the portmanteau inherently suggests. In their view, the term Spanglish deprives US Latinos of mastery in Spanish, a resource that can contribute to their socioeconomic advancement (also see González-Echevarría, 1997; López García-Molins, 2022). They argue that the term should be discarded and replaced with ‘Spanish in the US’ or ‘popular Spanish of the USA.’

Zentella (2016), however, underlines that the Spanglish label needs to be defended because terms like ‘popular Spanish of the USA’ ignore the oppression that Spanish speakers have been subjected to by English speakers in the US. In her view, it is not the label or their way of speaking that holds US Latinos back, but rather, pre-existing power imbalances and structural inequalities. Zentella notes that Spanglish has been racialized in the US, and just as opponents of civil rights movements in the 1960s decried race-mixing as detrimental to racial purity, detractors of Spanglish condemn the mixing of Spanish and English because they perceive it as a threat to the pristine purity of the Spanish language.

Consonant with Zentella (2016), Casielles-Suárez (2017) observes that the Spanglish label is vital because it is closely tied to speakers’ sociopolitical and cultural motivations. To many US Latinos, the term is representative of what they speak and who they are (also see Morales, 2002). Speakers’ deliberate use of the label is a means of legitimizing and defending their hybrid identities. It is also a form of resistance, in which Spanglish speakers reject both “assimilationist, English-only” and “nationalist Spanish-only” discourses (Arteaga, 1994, p. 27, cited in Casielles-Suárez, 2017, p. 163).

Importantly, speakers’ use of Spanglish is evidenced not only in oral speech, but in other forms of discourse as well, which include literary works, TV series, radio programs, music, etc. To this, we can add the incorporation of Spanglish in comics, where novel Spanglish forms and social satire are skillfully used to make strong political statements regarding issues that negatively impact US Latinos such as English-only laws (for examples from Mexican American cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, see Ragone, 2015). Thus, contrary to Otheguy and Stern, Spanglish cannot be dismissed merely as a casual oral register.

Moreno-Fernández (2017) reframes the label debate, underscoring that one of the key issues that affect US Spanish has nothing to do with the choice of the label, but rather, our knowledge of the unique formal and popular styles that constitute US Spanish. In his view, a General US Spanish norm still needs to be developed, but this requires a critical mass of sociolinguistic, geolinguistic, lexicographic, and discourse analytic research that is much larger and detailed that what currently exists. Moreno-Fernández emphasizes that any model of reference for General US Spanish will necessarily require careful consideration and inclusion of English-derived elements that are integral to Spanglish, which is a sub-variety of General US Spanish.

In addition to the label controversy, another question that has emerged is whether multiple varieties of Spanglish exist. Some scholars flatly reject not only the existence of Spanglish itself but varieties of Spanglish as well (López García-Molins, 2022; Marcos Marín, 2006). López García-Molins (2022) contends that Spanglish has no native speakers and is not a form of linguistic competence. In his view, Spanglish is not diatopic; thus, the geographical background of speakers has no effect on the manifestation of Spanglish. Lipski (2008, p. 70) opines that the frequency of anglicisms and code-switching does not vary regionally or socially with respect to US Spanish regional dialects. Therefore, “it makes no sense to speak of dialects of Spanglish”.

Contrariwise, others have proposed that Spanglish is not a monolithic contact variety, but rather, “[a] collection of related varieties that share certain features but differ on many others” (Reagan, 2023, p. 36). Rothman and Rell (2005) postulate that Cubonics in Miami is a variant of Spanglish. Sayer (2008) asserts that there are at least three varieties of Spanglish in the US, which correspond to the historically predominant groups of US Latinos: Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans (for relevant discussion, see Alvarez, 1997). Moreno-Fernández (2017) also suggests that Spanglish has different regional manifestations.

It is pertinent to note that these discussions and observations have been based on the US Hispanophone context, where scholarship on Spanglish has significantly expanded since the 1970s (see, for instance, recent work on Spanglish in audiovisual texts and the translation of Spanglish: Attig & Derrick, 2025). But what insights regarding Spanglish can be gained from Belize and Gibraltar? In the following section, we shift our focus to these two understudied contexts.

5. Spanglish in the US, Belize and Gibraltar

Spanglish is typically associated with key events in US history that led to the increased contact between Spanish and English, such as the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 when almost half of Mexico’s territory became part of the US, and the US declaration of Puerto Rico as officially bilingual in 1902. Before US expansionism, however, the presence of Spanish alongside English can be traced back to two other contexts that epitomize the imperial conflict between the British and Spanish empires: namely, Gibraltar, which was ceded to the British Crown under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and Belize, where British rule was consolidated after the Spaniards lost in the Battle of St. George’s Cay in 1798.

While the events that shaped the sociolinguistic landscape of the US, Belize, and Gibraltar in the last two centuries are markedly distinct, there are striking similarities with respect to the emergence of Spanglish in these three contexts. For example, in the 20th century, a hybrid or mixed identity was embraced by Spanish/English bilinguals in the US (Casielles-Suárez, 2017; Morales, 2002; Rothman & Rell, 2005), Belize (Balam & Baird, in press), and Gibraltar (Levey, 2015; Moyer, 1992; Rodríguez García, 2022, 2024). In both Belize (Bero, 2022, p. 58) and Gibraltar (Rodríguez García, 2022, p. 414), some speakers use the term Spanglish when describing their language practices (for recent news story on the Spanglish variety spoken in Gibraltar, see BBC News Mundo, 2025).

Presently, there is debate in Gibraltar as to whether the term Spanglish should be used in place of Llanito (Macdonald, 2024, p. 292; Rodríguez García, 2022, p. 414). It is important to underscore, however, that the hybrid variety spoken today in Gibraltar overwhelmingly comprises Spanish and English (Bermejo, 2025; Moyer, 1992; Rodríguez García, 2022, 2024), whereas lexical items from other languages such as Hebrew, Arabic and Genoese have largely fallen into disuse (Chevasco, 2020–2021, p. 4; Levey, 2015, p. 79). In the case of Belize, the alternation of languages among Mestizos is predominantly between Spanish and English, whereas Belizean Kriol plays a less prominent role in bi/multilingual speech (Balam, 2015, 2016a; Balam et al., 2021, 2024; Vanhaverbeke et al., 2021).

Another similarity across these three contexts is that the period between the 1960s and 1980s was fundamental either to the development or consolidation of Spanglish. In the US, Anzaldúa (1987) suggests that civil rights movements and the advent of bilingual poetryin the 1960s resulted in Latinos becoming increasingly aware of their hybrid identities and Spanglish practices. In 1970, Carrascolendas—the first bilingual children’s television series in the US—started airing in Austin, Texas (Barrera, 2001). In 1977, ¿Qué Pasa, USA?—which focused on the bicultural experiences of Cuban Americans in Miami—was the first bilingual sitcom that aired on US public television. The effective use of Spanglish in ¿Qué Pasa, USA? successfully captured US Latinos’ hybrid identities and established the benchmark for subsequent bilingual programming (cf. Montes-Alcalá, 2025).

In the Iberian Peninsula, the closure of the Gibraltar-Spain border (1969–1982) during Franco’s military dictatorship had a lasting impact on Gibraltarians, as it oriented them away from Spain and the Spanish language and towards Great Britain and English. More importantly, in the 1970s, the term Llanito (also spelled as Yanito) started to be used to refer not only to the people of Gibraltar, but also to Gibraltarians’ hybrid contact variety as well (Canessa, 2019; Macdonald, 2024). The first Yanito dictionary was published in 1978 (Levey, 2015). In the case of Belize, which gained its independence from Great Britain in 1981, secondary education became more accessible in different parts of the country during the 1960s and thereafter. This led to increased levels of bilingual competence among Mestizos, and hence, the more conventionalized use of Spanglish among younger generations (Balam & Baird, in press).

In terms of linguistic outcomes, there are similarities as well. Lipski (2008, p. 54) observes that “[d]ata on code-switching, calquing, and borrowing in Gibraltar is strikingly convergent with similar data in the United States” (for examples of lexical borrowings and calques in the Spanglish variety spoken in Gibraltar, see Levey, 2015, pp. 80–83). More recently, Bermejo (2025) makes a similar assertion regarding Spanish/English code-switching patterns in the US and Gibraltar. We can extend these observations to Belize. As

Table 2. Code-switching in Belize and Gibraltar.

Belize

Gibraltar

(a) Está chiquitito el space. ‘The space is very small.’ Previously unpublished example (b) Yo era la consentida. I was the baby. ‘I was the spoiled one. I was the baby.’ Previously unpublished example (c) Hicieron un new fourth form building solo para los fourth formers que está really pretty. ‘They built a new fourth form building only for fourth formers that is really pretty.’ Previously unpublished example (d) Well no está tan malo. ‘Well it’s not that bad.’ Previously unpublished example

(a) Y se lo quitó a un hobbit. ‘And he took it away from a hobbit.’ (Goria, 2020, p. 391) (b) Vamos a ver dónde está esto. Can you send me a screenshot? ‘Let’s see where this is. Can you send me a screenshot?’ (Rodríguez García, 2024, p. 71) (c) Pero aquí tenemos mountainside, coastline, snow, todo. ‘But here we have mountainside, coastline, snow, everything.’ (Weston, 2012, p. 12) (d) Bueno you weren’t able to go anyway. ‘Well you weren’t able to go anyway.’ (Rodríguez García, 2024, p. 84)

illustrates, in both Belize and Gibraltar, we can find examples of code-switching comprising the insertion of English lexical items, as in (a); the alternation of sentences or phrases within a sentence, as in (b) and (c) respectively, and the employment of other-language discourse markers, as in (d).

There are also specific morphosyntactic structures that are common to these three contexts. Consider, for instance, hacer bilingual compound verbs (BCVs), which are used in Southwest US (Pfaff, 1979; Vanhaverbeke et al., 2025), Belize (Balam, 2015, 2016a, 2021; Balam et al., 2014), and Gibraltar (Bermejo, 2025; Moyer, 1992; Rodríguez García, 2022). In these hybrid constructions, as

Table 3. Hacer BCVs in Spanglish varieties.

Belize

Gibraltar

El program es como un incentive donde hacemos encourage que hagan save, ¿y cómo hacemos encourage que hagan save? Pues nosotros hacemos match el amount de savings de ellos. Tiene un maximum de eighty dollars, pero cuando ya llegues a eighty dollars, entonces ya vas a tené el double right? The program is like an incentive where we encourage them to save. And how do we encourage them to save? Well, we match their savings amount. It has a maximum of eighty dollars, but when you get to eighty dollars, then you will have double the amount, right? (Balam, 2016b, p. 12)

¿Cómo estás llevando el confinement, brother? Yo lo llevo really bad, man, se me está haciendo very heavy. Esta ha sío mi muy primera vez que me he tenío que queá tanto tiempo at home. Yo no quiero salí pa na porque estoy very scared, pero esta mañana he hecho wake up más temprano de lo que suele ser y estaba supuesto de ir a Morrison’s pa hacer shopping. How are you dealing with the confinement, brother? I am taking it badly, man, it’s becoming too heavy to bear. This has been the very first time that I have had to stay at home for so long. I don’t want to go out at all because I am very scared, but this morning I woke up earlier than usual, and I was supposed to go shopping at Morrison’s. (Bermejo, 2025, p. 71)

illustrates, the inflected Spanish light verb hacer ‘do’ carries grammatical information, whereas the English lexical verb mainly provides semantic content (e.g., encourage, save, match, wake up, shopping).

Crucially, in Belize and Southwest US, hacer overwhelmingly co-occurs with an English infinitive verb (Balam, 2016a). Contrariwise, in Gibraltar, the English lexical item is typically a gerund (e.g., ‘hacer shopping’ instead of ‘hacer shop’: Bermejo, 2025, p. 71; ‘hacer cheating’ instead of ‘hacer cheat’: Rodríguez García, 2022, p. 414; ‘Hicimos booking los flights’ instead of ‘Hicimos book los flights’: Gibraltar National Archives & University of Cambridge, 2024, p. 38). The use of this bilingual structure in three different national contexts underscores patterns of uniformity and variability that exemplify the dynamic nature of Spanglish. Given that hacer BCVs lack morphosyntactic equivalents in Spanish and English, they reveal that Spanglish may be characterized by structural hybridity and novel forms that do not conform to pre-existing rules or structures found in the component languages (for findings on word order in Spanglish written discourse that support this view, see Betti & Enghels, 2018). In this regard, as Betti and Enghels advance, Spanglish grammar sheds insight into key principles of human language such as creativity and productivity.

Note that even though Zentella (2016, p. 16) strongly disagrees with Otheguy and Stern (2010) on several grounds, she distances herself, like Otheguy and Stern, from the idea that Spanglish or US Spanish evinces hybridity and reiterates the idea that “Spanglish speakers follow English rules in the English part of their sentences and Spanish rules in the Spanish part” (for similar postulation, see López García-Molins, 2022, p. 43). This view excludes the possibility of structural hybridity and fails to account for Spanglish data in both US and non-US contexts where speakers employ structural hybridity to optimize the linguistic resources at their disposal. There is theoretical and empirical work that has long challenged the notion that language alternation merely entails the combination of two grammatical systems that remain strictly autonomous in bilingual speech (e.g., Gardner-Chloros, 2009; Gardner-Chloros & Edwards, 2004; Toribio, 2004, and references therein).

Furthermore, the mainstream conceptualization of language mixing as the neat combination of two systems that remain strictly autonomous has been questioned in previous work, precisely because we must be able to account for hybrid constructions like hacer BCVs (Balam, 2021, pp. 84–89; for relevant work on exoskeletal approaches to language mixing, see Grimstad et al., 2018). López (2020), who analyzes these structures from a formal syntactic lens, contends that these constructions evidence that among bi/multilinguals code-switching constitutes the point of reference rather than monolingual language usage, which for decades has been held as the starting point of bi/multilingual speech. Thus, when Spanglish speakers mix their languages, they avoid limiting themselves to just half or a portion of the morphosyntactic and lexico-semantic resources available to them.

The idea of hybridity is central to the conceptualization of Spanglish, both in terms of its linguistic manifestation and its value as an identity marker. The reason why many critics disparage borrowings, calques, and semantic extensions is specifically because these phenomena evince the convergent mixture of two languages. On the other hand, code-switching is embraced because in the mainstream view, the two languages are alternated but remain intact, without contamination from the other language. In Dumitrescu’s (2013, pp. 357–358) words, the former would be ‘bad Spanglish’ whereas the latter would be ‘good Spanglish’, typically associated with the idealized balanced bilingual speaker. It is ‘bad Spanglish’ that Spanish language academies have long sought to eradicate, with little success. The inherent problem with this evaluation is that in communities characterized by the sustained contact between Spanish and English, Spanglish speakers use not only code-switching, but also borrowings, calques, semantic extensions, and sometimes even hybrid constructions as well.

Spanglish must be valued in its entirety because of its identity value. While it is true that standard varieties of Spanish and English have more instrumental value, Spanglish has an identity value that is crucial to Spanglish speakers, especially those who have been speaking it since early childhood. Valuing only certain aspects of Spanglish (i.e., code-switching) is akin to not valuing a Spanglish speaker as a whole person. Access to and mastery of standard varieties should not be gained at the expense of speakers’ shame or loss of their hybrid linguistic identities. Meighan (2023) reminds us that the privileging of colonial languages or forms of knowledge, or colonialingualism, perpetuates an imperialistic worldview that is detrimental to multilingual speakers’ identities. It is important to remember that Spanish is not just a minoritized or heritage language in the US. In the Americas, it is also a colonial language that historically led to the stigmatization and erasure of indigenous identities.

Ultimately, attacks from detractors of Spanglish stem from an inability or refusal to accept three things: that the instrumental and identity values of speakers’ multiple language varieties cannot be separated; that speakers’ linguistic and social identities need not be oppositional or replaced with broader ones that are perceived as more prestigious (for relevant discussion, see May, 2005), and that Spanglish speakers may employ forms that evince structural hybridity. As it relates to the last point, cross-community studies are fundamental to helping us further unravel the polymorphic nature of Spanglish. In the ensuing section, we take a closer look at these studies.

6. Varieties of Spanglish: Uniformity and Variability

Two decades after Gardner-Chloros and Edwards (2004) and Alfonzetti (2005) advocated for more comparative research, it is still the prevailing norm to analyze language contact phenomena from a ‘single-community’ perspective. As it relates to the study of Spanglish, there have been only a handful of studies that have systematically analyzed code-switching from a comparative lens, mainly focusing on the US and Belize. This bourgeoning body of work offers support to the view that there are different varieties of Spanglish. While there are cross-community similarities, there is also evidence that some structures and patterns are context-specific. This indicates that language experience plays a primary role in conditioning not only Spanglish speakers’ oral production but their linguistic competence as well, contrary to the assertion that Spanglish is not diatopic in nature (Lipski, 2008; López García-Molins, 2022; Marcos Marín, 2006).

In terms of uniformity, similar patterns have been found between Miami and Gibraltar vis-à-vis Spanish/English verb switches. Guzzardo Tamargo (2012) examined the use of estar ‘be’ and haber ‘have’ switches in corpus data from 26 informal conversations between Spanish/English bilinguals (ages between 9 and 66) from Miami, Florida as well as written production data from 88 entries of the editorial column La Calentita: Gibraltar’s National Dish (published between 2004–2011). Results showed that ‘estar + English participle’ switches were highly infrequent in both datasets. In the Miami data, there were only seven cases (i.e., 7.5%) in which the switch occurred between the Spanish auxiliary estar and an English participle, as in (2). In the Gibraltar data, only eight cases (7.5%) were found, as in (3).

(2)	Lo están testing ahora
	‘They are testing it now.’
(3)	The weather parece que está improving
	‘The weather looks like it is improving.’

Furthermore, no instances of ‘haber + English participle’ switches were attested in either dataset. Thus, despite differences in modality, similar bilingual patterns in progressive structures were found, thus lending support to the claim that there are analogous code-switching patterns between the US and Gibraltar (Bermejo, 2025, p. 73; Levey, 2015, p. 78; Lipski, 2008, p. 54; Moyer, 1992, pp. 197–200).

Vanhaverbeke et al. (2021) also found similarities in a comparative analysis of monolingual and bi/multilingual diminutive constructions in corpus data from Miami (n = 891 tokens) and Northern Belize (n = 1057 tokens). Among other findings, results showed that in both contexts, code-switching in diminutive constructions predominantly occurs between English bases and Spanish markers (e.g., un pequeño pocket ‘a little pocket’, un poquito challenging ‘a little challenging’, etc.). Nominal and adjectival bases are the grammatical categories that were most frequently diminutivized. As it relates to analytic diminutives, little was the most frequent analytical diminutive marker in Miami whereas the Spanish marker un poco ‘a little’ was most frequent in Belize.

Notably, a significant association was found between the frequency of code-switching in diminutive constructions and the community where Spanglish is spoken. Code-switched diminutive constructions were eight times more frequent in the Belize data than in the Miami dataset. This significant association was present even with the exclusion of trilingual diminutive constructions, as in (4) and (5), in which the productive Belizean Kriol diminutive marker lee ‘little’ was employed.

(4)	Se miraba como un lee cave bien neat
	‘It looked like a really neat, little cave.’
(5)	Ellos siempre estaban allí en su lee corner
	‘They were always there in their little corner.’

The significant association, therefore, cannot be attributed to the use of lee, but rather to the unmarked status of Spanish/English code-switching in Belize. Lastly, the contrastive use of Spanish to encode affective meaning versus English to express objective meaning was characteristic of bilinguals from Miami, but not speakers from Belize, who employ either Spanish or English to express either type of meaning (for a comparative analysis of intensification in Miami and El Paso, see Claassen & Enghels, 2025).

As it relates to variability, context-specific patterns have emerged in speakers’ judgments of verb switches. Drawing on intuitional data collected via a two-alternative forced-choice (2 AFC) task, Balam et al. (2020) comparatively examined the acceptability of hacer and estar BCVs in present progressive constructions. The study revealed that language experience influences speakers’ judgments. Whereas New Mexico and Puerto Rico bilinguals gave the most preferential ratings to estar BCVs, as in (6), Northern Belize bilinguals gave the most preferential ratings to hacer BCVs, as in (7). Crucially, only Northern Belize and New Mexico bilinguals who use hacer constructions accepted hacer constructions. Contrariwise, Puerto Rico bilinguals rejected them.

(6)	La secretaria está auditing el report.
	‘The secretary is auditing the report.’
(7)	La secretaria está haciendo audit el report.
	‘The secretary is auditing the report.’

This suggests that exposure to or use of hacer BCVs are necessary conditions for speakers to develop intuitional knowledge about these hybrid verb structures. Contrariwise, estar BCVs are not constrained by speakers’ exposure to these constructions, as they were rated to different degrees as acceptable by all bilingual groups (for relevant research, see Balam et al., 2021). The overall preference that Spanish/English bilinguals in the US have for estar BCVs, as in (6), was also found in a constructive replication study conducted by Olson (2024).

Further evidence that language experience modulates linguistic competence was found in a subsequent study on bilingual passive BCVs. Balam et al. (2023) carried out a cross-community analysis of stative and eventive bilingual passive BCVs in Spanish/English code-switching, as in (8) and (9) respectively.

(8)	Jessica se molestó porque la batería no estaba hecho charged.
	‘Jessica got angry because the battery wasn’t charged.’
(9)	Hector se molestó porque la escuela no fue hecho recognized.
	‘Hector got angry because the school wasn’t recognized.’

The analysis of intuitional data from Northern Belize (n = 149) and Southwest US (n = 36) bi/multilinguals showed that both groups gave the highest ratings to bilingual statives passives without the light verb hacer. As it relates to eventive passive BCVs, however, whereas Southwest US bilinguals rejected constructions as in (9), Northern Belize bi/multilinguals gave these passives the highest ratings. This aligns with the fact that these infrequent structures have been attested in oral production data from Belize but not Southwest US. Thus, findings show that passivization is compatible with hacer, but this is determined by community-specific linguistic norms rather than a universal syntactic restriction on code-switching, as González-Vilbazo and López (2011) claim.

While the aforementioned studies have been based either on oral production or speakers’ judgements, Albu (2025) examined both oral production and intuitional data to study the effect of different factors (i.e., unaccusativity, telicity, agentivity, animacy of the subject, and aspectual class) on the selection of English lexical verbs in hacer BCVs. In oral production data from Northern Belize (i.e., 79 BCVs from 20 speakers) and El Paso (i.e., 48 BCVs from 32 speakers), Albu found that telicity (i.e., whether an event has a clear endpoint) was the semantic parameter that had the least influence on the selection of the English verb in hacer BCVs whereas animacy of the subject was the most influential. Parallel results were found in the analysis of intuitional data from Northern Belize (n = 13), El Paso (n = 8), and New Mexico (n = 4) bi/multilinguals.

In relation to aspectual class in oral production, the light verb hacer predominantly co-occurred with activity verbs in Northern Belize, as in (10). In El Paso, however, hacer mainly co-occurred with achievement verbs, as in (11). Furthermore, Northern Belize participants showed the highest acceptance rates across aspectual classes, with accomplishment verbs receiving the highest mean rating. On the other hand, El Paso and New Mexico bilinguals showed low acceptability scores across aspectual classes. Albu’s findings suggest not only that sensitivity to aspectual class is community dependent, but also that these constructions have a higher degree of acceptability and usage in Northern Belize than in US contexts like El Paso and New Mexico.

(10)	Okay, yo hacía coach football
	‘Okay, I used to coach football.’
(11)	Hicieron demolish todo
	‘They demolished everything.’

Although comparative studies have focused on code-switching, there is research which suggests that the use of other Spanglish phenomena such as semantic extensions can be community dependent as well. Balam et al. (2024) analyzed agarrar ‘grab’ verb constructions (n = 313), which have been previously documented in Southwest US (Sayer, 2008). They found that the verb agarrar primarily co-occurs with abstract noun complements, consonant with data from Texas in the US (Bullock et al., 2021). Unlike data from Texas, however, where the auxiliary-like verb agarrar ‘grab’ is generally calqued on the English light verb ‘get’ (e.g., agarrar ayuda ‘get help’), agarrar is predominantly generalized along the lines of the English verb ‘take’ in Northern Belize (e.g., Agarra tus estudios seriously ‘Take your studies seriously’). This points in the direction that intense contact with English results in the extended use of agarrar. The nature of this semantic extension, however, differs between Southwest US and Belize.

The Belize data also show atypical patterns in the use of agarrar; namely, tense mismatches between the first and second verb, and deletion of the conjunction in agarrar y pseudocoordination, as in (12) and (13) respectively. Furthermore, agarrar typically occurs in contexts where the semantically related verb tomar ‘take’ is typically used in monolingual Spanish (e.g., agarrar precautions ‘to take precautions’ = tomar precauciones), thus raising questions as to the status of tomar in relation to agarrar.

(12)	Solo garra y se quedaba sentada
	‘She only goes and would stay sitting down.’
(13)	La nurse solita garró abrió la gaveta
	‘The nurse went opened the drawer.’

Balam et al. (2024) posit that the extended use of agarrar as a light verb, and patterns like (12) and (13) are indicative of the advanced grammaticalization of agarrar in Belize. Although findings from this study revealcontext-specific patterns, the use of TAKE-class verbs (i.e., coger ‘take’, tomar ‘take’, and agarrar ‘grab’) in Spanglish merits further investigation from a comparative lens.

Collectively, these studies illustrate the value of cross-community research in helping us to elucidate the uniformity and variability that characterize the linguistic nature of Spanglish in different parts of the world today. Comparative research on hacer BCVs, for instance, shows that when these constructions are investigated across communities, we get a more fine-grained picture of the morphosyntactic patterns that differentiate Belize from the US Hispanophone context. More research is needed, however, to further test hypotheses that have been proposed regarding different language contact phenomena (for relevant discussion, see Blokzijl et al., 2017; Parafita Couto & Gullberg, 2017). These studies are essential to unravel the ways in which different factors have shaped the emergence and development of Spanglish varieties in the US, Belize, and Gibraltar.

Although recent comparative studies on code-switching contribute to our understanding of the dynamic nature of Spanglish varieties, these are only preliminary steps that will need to be further developed and refined. In the future, success will require greater collaboration among scholars and research teams, both in the collection of data and sharing of datasets and materials to improve methodological approaches in the comparative analysisof Spanglish. A limitation in previous comparative studies has been that the influence of linguistic, social, and/or cognitive factors has not been simultaneously investigated. There needs to be more detailed investigation into how these concomitant variables interact.

In his constructive replication study, for instance, Olson (2024) found that language dominance (i.e., Spanish-dominant vs. English-dominant) can impact speakers’ judgements of bilingual structures. The influence of language dominance in languages other than Spanish and English could be further investigated among multilinguals in Belize (e.g., Belizean Kriol) and Gibraltar (e.g., Arabic). Other factors that merit further investigation include the frequency of use of code-switching (i.e., rarely, sometimes, or always), speakers’ reported attitudes towards Spanglish phenomena (i.e., positive, neutral, or negative), and speakers’ linguistic identity (i.e., identification with Spanglish vs. identification with a monolingual variety). The study of identity is especially relevant given that Spanglish in the US, Belize, and Gibraltar is intricately connected to a hybrid or mixed identity among bi/multilinguals, as pointed out in Section 4 and Section 5.

More attention also needs to be given to the cross-community analysis of Spanglish phenomena among the youngest generations (i.e., adolescents and children). Spanglish has been spoken for at least two generations in Belize (Balam, 2016a; Balam & Baird, in press) and Gibraltar (Bermejo, 2025; Canessa, 2019; Goria, 2020; Rodríguez García, 2022, 2024). Given that Spanglish (or ‘speech mixture’ as Espinosa labeled it) has been present in the US since the 1800s (for examples of early Spanglish forms, see Lamar Prieto, 2012, pp. 294–297), this contact variety has likely been spoken in some US communities for more than two generations as well. Studying these populations is imperative because it will cast light into the present and future of Spanglish, which as scholars emphasize, is in a constant state of flux and transformation (Bermejo, 2025; Levey, 2015; López García-Molins, 2022; Macdonald, 2024; Moreno-Fernández, 2017). Research thus far suggests that while there is an ongoing transition to English monolingualism in Gibraltar, sociolinguistic conditions in Belize and certain parts of the US are more propitious for the vitality and intergenerational transmission of Spanglish. More research, however, is needed to better understand the conditions and processes that contribute either to the loss, maintenance, or evolution of Spanglish.

7. Concluding Remarks

Contrary to popular knowledge and the Royal Spanish Academy’s current definition, Spanglish is a sociolinguistic phenomenon that is not exclusive to the US. It is essential that scholarly work and discussions on Spanglish are no longer conducted from an exclusionary point of view, sidelining or ignoring Belize and Gibraltar, where the mixing of Spanish and English has been well documented in extant literature. In Zentella’s (2016, p. 29) view, the study of Spanglish is vital because it “invites us to discuss the specific sociohistoric, cultural, economic, and racial contexts that give rise to Spanglish”. This applies, however, not only to the US but to Belize and Gibraltar as well, which contain vital pieces of information to the puzzle that constitutes the dynamic hybrid variety that emerged from the contact between two colonial languages that still hold significant global influence in the world today.

As bi/multilingual corpora become more publicly available (e.g., El Paso Bilingual Corpus: Vanhaverbeke et al., 2025; on the Crossing Language Borders Corpus currently being created, see Albu, 2025, pp. 24–25), it would be advantageous for researchers to embrace the examination of Spanglish phenomena from a cross-community rather than a ‘single-community’ lens. Comparative research on Spanglish offers a promising avenue of scholarship that will allow us to not only better disentangle and further develop theoretical accounts of language contact outcomes but also further elucidate the roles that language-internal factors, community linguistic norms, and structural hybridity play in the polymorphic manifestation of Spanglish varieties (cf. Aboh & Parafita Couto, 2024; Balam et al., 2020, 2023).

Last but not least, research on Spanglish compels us to challenge and reevaluate monolingual ideologies that characterize the Spanish-speaking world, where, sadly and paradoxically, it has not been English but rather Spanish that for centuries has continuously led to the marginalization and loss of indigenous languages. As it relates to the study of Spanish and Spanglish, one of the greatest ironies is that despite the absence of a Spanish language academy, and even though the Spaniards never occupied Belize and that English is the country’s sole official language, it is in Belize where Spanish has today risen as the most widely spoken first language and where Spanglish also thrives (Balam & Baird, in press). While there have been only few attempts to investigate Spanglish from a comparative lens, my hope is that this paper will spark increased interest in the cross-community study of Spanglish.