Spanish is the second most common language spoken in the US, because our country essentially grabbed a big ol’ part of what used to be Mexico around 170 years ago, for one thing.
Ya think. That would account for all the Spanish spoken in NYC 172 years after the Mexican American War.
That’s… not exactly true. It’s been th growth of Spanish speaking peoples in the US over the last 50 years plus the now-acceptible persistence of cultural attributes that were before washed out.
Just since 1979 according to Pew the Hispanic population has grown from 9.6 million in 1970 to 57.5 million in 2016.
That works out to about 4% a year btw.
No, that’s the legacy of the war that we were involved in about 50 years later. ;-)
Of course, there are lots and lots of Hispanic people who barely speak a word of Spanish, or speak it poorly. I run into it all the time. Foreign language"fade" over a generation or two is still a thing.
True.
I actually think the Spanish you hear in most of America is due to the Ag industry needing workers. Everywhere in America became dependent on cheap imported labor at some point (after WW2 maybe?) and many of those who came here eventually decided to stay.
Many people only think of states like California for that but any state that has Ag has become dependent on cheap imported labor, from Idaho to Georgia.
Eventually those families left Ag and joined mainstream America as employees and employers.
Very much a thing. I grew up in rural SW Arizona and took Spanish in high school. A number of my classmates were 2nd and 3rd generation Hispanic kids who didn’t know Spanish any more than I did going into the classes.
Well, if you can go three generations back… my Polish and German aren’t so hot either.
In rural areas, absolutely.
But the vast majority of immigrants go straight to cities, because that’s where the majority of jobs open to immigrants are (and this has always been true historically, since the USA has been the USA.)
Total agricultural employment in the US is 2 million people; the total number of undocumented immigrants is 11 million (about half of which are from Mexico.)
And of course there’s a transitional period whenever languages “collide” where there is a huge adoption of loan words, mostly nouns (“la troca” for the truck, “la rufa” for the roof*), but sometimes straight up calques of idiomatic expressions, as in “ir p’atrás” (“ir para atrás” as an equivalent of “to go back” meaning “to return”).
Sometimes there are comical results, where one might hear, “¿Qué está haciendo Ricardo? Está deliberando grocerías.” The intended meaning of the last sentence is “he’s delivering groceries” which would properly be expressed “está entregando abarrotes.” But the comedy is that it could be understood as “he’s ruminating on/deliberating [deliberando] rude things [grocerías].”
*much like English got words from Spanish like “hoosegow” [from “juzgado”] “lariat” [“la reata”] and “rodeo” [meaning “roundup/surrounding”]. There existed perfectly good words for most of those things already but the dominant language (in the Southwestern US, Spanish at one time) gave rise to the adoption.
Bless you.
I’ve actually never heard that term used, and I live in CA where you here a fair amount of Spanish mixed into our English. I had to google it.
It’s a term that one heard a lot in Westerns (movies and TV) of the middle of the last century. I was born in '61, and I’m sure its use even then was mostly in scripts/screenplays coming out of Hollywood. It may have been in common use in the 19th Century, would be my guess.
That would be due to unpleasant conditions in Puerto Rico throughout the twentieth century. And the reason for those conditions? The Spanish-American war combined with the usual American disdain for our possessions.
My great grandmother and grandfather were immigrants from Poland. They didn’t speak a word of English. My grandmother, and grandfather too, whose parents were also Polish, both spoke Polish fluently, but also had no hint of an accent when they spoke English (also fluently). My mother knows a handful of Polish words and phrases, learned when she was growing up. (She is also an amazing cook of Polish food.)
Me, I can count on one hand the number of Polish words and phrases I know. This despite listening to my grandparents argue with each other in Polish when I was growing up. (I definitely know how to say “shut up” in Polish.)
That’s the problem. I think it’s not news because there’s a new massive scandal every day. I think people are becoming accustomed to the fact that this is just how people in power operate. I don’t know how we as a country can rewind this. Even if Trump gets voted out in 2020, there will be massive lingering damage to government ethics and rule of law in this country.
I live in the Vatican, and also can’t stand it when people talk in Spanish!
Every old western movie has the bad guys being sent to the hoosegow. (sp)
While I’m not a huge fan of westerns, I’ve seen my fair share. Do you remember a few where the term was used? Are we talking Eastwood era westerns or even earlier? I’ll admit, I haven’t seen many of the Wayne era (or earlier) westerns.
We’re talking 50s/60s movies. Maybe earlier.