spanglish

Last week I was pretty taken aback when I heard someone say that “el Spanglish es una aberración” (literally an aberration, an outrage). The craziest thing is that this person — an old colleague and friend of my husband’s who is Argentinian, but has lived in Miami for a long time —  said this as he admitted to using it himself! Then I realized I got exactly what he meant because I used to be one of them: the anti-Spanglish,Read More ...

I used to be pretty harsh on myself if I couldn’t finish a sentence without going back and forth between English and Spanish when speaking with other bilinguals, an action commonly known as code-switching among linguists. Like many bilinguals and monolinguals alike, I simply believed this was wrong. I thought it meant I wasn’t really proficient in either language—even when I knew this not to be the case—or that I was simply forgetting my Spanish. I was wrong! In theRead More ...

Although I know most people would just find it funny–I mean, even I chuckled when I first heard it–the truth is I was pretty disturbed by what happened a few days ago while my daughter, Vanessa, was building a house with her pink and purple blocks. We were in the living room and she was telling me what she was doing when, all of a sudden, one of the towers she had built toppled to the ground. Her reaction wasRead More ...

Hola and Happy Easter to all! We’ll spend the afternoon decorating eggs and helping our daughter during her first-ever egg hunt, but more than anything, we’ll be spending a lot of time en familia and we hope you will too! But first, our weekly round up of links you might be interested in checking out: 1. Raising a Child in Two Worlds – My child doesn’t look quite like me (Caucasian) or her father (Colombian); she’s something new for bothRead More ...