Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau live together, work together and, between the two of them, have published six books (including Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong and The Story of French) and more than 1,000 magazine articles, and have won multiple awards in journalism. Their new book, The Story of Spanish (St. Martin's Press), is a history of Spanish from its roots as an obscure dialect confined to a remote group of farmers in northern Spain to a language spoken by 450 million people in 22 countries; the book is an engaging mix of travel, personal anecdotes and extensive research. Visit their website to learn the connection between "España" and rabbits.
Your book charts the progress of the Spanish language as it spreads across the globe. What has happened with the language here in the U.S. as it shifts from being a "foreign" language to one widely used?
In The Story of Spanish we actually argue that Spanish is not a foreign language in the United States. And never really has been. This is true from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Spanish didn't enter the U.S.--the U.S. entered the Spanish-speaking world by annexing a huge part of Mexico as what is now the U.S. Southwest. In fact, the earliest explorers in the continental U.S. were Spanish. And ranching culture, itself, came from Spain, after being developed in Mexico. A lot of the vocabulary that goes with it, like buckaroo and lasso, comes from Spanish.
We're Canadian, and before writing this book, we wanted to get first-hand experience of the role Spanish plays in the U.S. So in 2010 we moved to Phoenix for six months to do research. A couple of months after we got there, we happened to see Mexican immigrants in our neighborhood cutting cactus leaves in their gardens to make nopalitos, and it struck us that the Hispanics in Arizona are really much more at home living in the desert than most of the other people around us! But, of course, that makes sense, since Phoenix and the whole U.S. southwest used belong to Mexico.
But even in the contemporary U.S., it doesn't really make sense to speak of Spanish as a foreign language. The U.S. is becoming an important "Hispanic" country in and of itself. Over the last 50 years Hispanic population of the United States has grown faster than any other part of the Spanish-speaking world. If demographic predictions bear out, by 2050, the Hispanic population of the U.S. will surpass that of Spain. Meanwhile, inside the Spanish-speaking world, the U.S. is already considered as an important player, both because of its buying power and because it exports so many Spanish-language cultural products. This is having a huge effect on the Spanish spoken inside the U.S. The U.S. even has its own Spanish-language academy, one of the 22 such academies in the Spanish-speaking world. And in 2014, the Spanish Academy in Madrid will be including "U.S Spanish" words like departamento in its dictionary.
You write about the term "Spanglish," with all of the loaded meaning it carries. Do you see it as a derogatory term?
There's a lot of confusion about Spanglish. Spanglish is not a language. It's a register of oral Spanish characterized by code-switching (switching back and forth between two languages). Surprisingly, some very well respected linguists--including the ones who write the Dictionary of the Royal Academy in Madrid--don't look down on Spanglish because, strictly speaking, there's no reason to worry about it. It's just an oral linguistic phenomenon. It doesn't affect the standard written language much.
Despite the attention it attracts, Spanglish is not the most important thing going on in Spanish in the United States. Few people know it, but Spanish-language translators, newsmakers, writers, publicists and editors are in the process of creating a standard Spanish of the United States. And this is not really new. Associated Press published its own U.S. Spanish-language style manual in 1953.
To be clear, the scripted Spanish of Univision's anchorman, Jorge Ramos, is not Spanglish, and it's not the Spanish used in Mexico or in Spain. Ramos uses standard U.S. Spanish, or something close to it (because the national standard for Spanish has not yet been clearly defined). The U.S. Spanish-language academy, the Academia Norteamericana de la lengua española, is working on this, and Harvard University will soon host a new office of the Cervantes Institute, which will study U.S. Spanish.
The process is accelerating. As the number of Hispanic media in the United States explodes, the need for a defined, written standard of U.S. Spanish is getting more urgent.
You describe how the death of Francisco Franco in 1975 ushered in a counterculture--la Movida, or "the scene"--that has grown over the years, and you attribute a great deal of Spain's cultural production and language development to the public's reaction to Franco's passing. Was this a singular cultural event, or are there parallels in modern cultures that could result in a similar seismic cultural shift?
No, this has happened often in the past. One good example was post-revolutionary Mexico in the 1920s, which started a cultural explosion that went on for 50 years. The same thing happened in our own province of Quebec, in the 1960s, when the so-called Quiet Revolution sparked a phase of radical cultural awakening. In the U.S., the explosion of both Afro-American and Hispanic cultures is closely related to the counterculture of the civil rights movement.
But the main reason we devote a chapter to the Franco period in Spain is that the story of what the Spanish language went through during those 40 years is quite amazing. Franco tried to cut Spain off from outside influences. As part of that, he tried to freeze the Spanish language. And you know what? It didn't work. The Spanish kept writing books, producing groundbreaking art and making films, even if they had to leave Spain or go underground to do it. We describe several famous cases of characters who even wrote unauthorized Spanish dictionaries to keep Spanish vocabulary up-to-date! The Franco years are a perfect illustration of the central theme of our book: that languages are living things, constantly changing. The stories of languages are shaped by all sorts of factors--by politics, economics, geopolitics and more. --Matthew Tiffany, counselor, writer for Condalmo