Nicotina

A movie was realeased in the United States with the name Nicotina: La Vida Unfiltered. It is a very good example of Spanglish being put to use. The movie itself, made in Mexico, is spoken in Spanish.
On the movie's poster, there is a tablet from lotería, Mexico's version of bingo. The usual loteria tablets have squares, with pictures and their respective names in Spanish, such as a mermaid with its text saying "La Sirena" (The Mermaid) . The names we see on this poster's loteria tablet, however, are a Spanish-English hybrid: indeed, our old friend Spanglish. The movie, made with the colaboration of three countries (Mexico, Spain, Argentina), is spoken thoroughly in Spanish, in the U.S. shown with English subtitles. Examining the poster, we notice first that the movie's name itself was not translated; it was kept in Spanish: Nicotina (and not Nicotine). Underneath the main title, there is the phrase La Vida Unfiltered. This is the most noticeable example of Spanglish in the poster, where we have La Vida (The Life) coupled with English Unfiltered. In pure Spanish, the phrase would be La Vida Infiltrada, and in English, The Unfiltered Life. The next thing which catches the eye are the squares, with pictures and their names, except that unlike the traditional lotería, these names are printed, again, in Spanglish. The names themselves are in English, with their respective definite articles in Spanish, the perfect brew to make Spanglish (as discussed in a previous entry: Spanglish in Action). Following here, I list the titles under these squares , as can be seen in the poster (I), together with what would be pure English (II) and pure Spanish (III).

Table 1

I Spanglish	II English	III Spanish
El Hacker	The Hacker	El Hacker
Los Codes	The Codes	Los Codigos
Los Diamonds	The Diamonds	Los Diamantes
El Barber	The Barber	El Barbero
La Chick	The Chick	La Chica
La Bullet	The Bullet	La Bala
El Russian	The Russian	El Ruso
El Cigarette	The Cigarette	El Cigarro
El Coyote	The Coyote	El Coyote
El Pharmacist	The Pharmacist	El Farmacista
La Death	The Death	La Muerte

Any words that are put together, coming from the two languages, keep their own character, including the pronunciation that that each one has in the language it comes from. You will notice that El Coyote looks the same in columns I and III. The phrase in the Spanish column would be pronounced as regular Spanish. However, in Spanglish, the word Coyote would be pronounced as in English, and the definite article would be pronounced as in pure Spanish, [ɛl], without a velarized /l/ which would actually be used in English words (hence, the particle el is not rendered as [ɛɫ], which would sound like an English word, not a Spanish one, and the character of Spanglish is to mix both, while each others' grammatical and pronunciation rules are respected, as I have stated before). Thus, we would hear [ɛl kaɪoʊɾi] in I, [ðə kaɪoʊɾi] in II, and [ɛl kojote]. A similar switch occurs with /r/. In Spanish, the phonemic distinction is maintained between an alveolar tap ([ɾ]) and an alveolar trill ([r]). In Spanglish, then, there coexist three renditions of /r/, besides these two, the English retroflex approximant ([ɻ]). The latter one is used in the English part of a Spanglish discourse, the former two in the Spanish part. This gives Spanglish a very unique sound. An example I can draw here would be using the words carro, caro and car, each in a Spanglish conversation being pronounced, respectively, [karo], [kaɾo] and [kɑɻ].The absence of any one of these three phonemes would indicate a "foreign" speaker; to Spanglish, that is. Only rarely have I encountered only the retroflex approximant in potential Spanglish speakers. Potential because this has been from American people of Hispanic descent, but who know little or no Spanish, and end up instead with something that can't be understood in English, Spanish or Spanglish. On the other side of this are those people who would pronounce English words with Spanish phonetics. These are generally people who are monolingual in Spanish, and use that other sort of Spanglish I've discussed, where they adopt English words to replace their native Spanish lexicon. Thus, with Hacker from the first row, we would hear [ɛl hækʰəɻ] from a Spanish/English bilingual speaker in the US, but [ɛl xakɛr] from a Spanish monolingual.