What is Spanish? A linguist’s perspective
Posted on Jul 17, 2018 by Trevor in Misc
Below is a transcript of linguist John McWhorter explaining why trying to create “tidy categories” of languages isn’t a good way of understanding how they work in reality. He uses Spanish and its many variants and related languages as an example. This is from his lecture series “The Story of Human Language”.
Spain
First we start in Spain. It’s a bundle of dialects. Castilian Spanish is one dialect. That one happens to have gotten into the books.
But there are other dialects in Spain. Now, if you think of a map, then you know that Portugal is next door to Spain, and if you picture the map, you realize that the boundary between Portugal and Spain is just artificial, and that in terms of land, really we are just dealing with Iberia. So as we would expect, Spanish shades into Portuguese, particularly through varieties like Galician. And so if we were not dealing with two separate “nations” on Iberia, then we would just think of Spanish and Portuguese as variations on the same thing. They’re partly mutually intelligible, and especially that’s the case on the page.
The New World
Then, in the New World, because of the Spanish colonial phase there are hundreds of dialects of Latin American Spanish. They differ from Castilian Spanish on all levels, not only words
but in the sound systems (the Castilian “th” is not in Latin America) and then there are all sorts of grammatical differences. And so that’s a whole different bunch of Spanishes.
But then, in Ecuador, this Latin American Spanish mixed with Quechua and became Media Lengua. … And actually, there’s a kind of a continuum. There are many Media Lenguas that are pure Quechua with just Spanish words, then in between there are various varieties where Spanish plays more of a part in the grammar. So that’s generally the way things go. So Media Lengua is an extreme.
There are two Spanish creoles in the New World. One of them is Papiamento, which is spoken in Curaçao. And then another one is spoken in Colombia in a small town called El Palenque de San Basilio. And it is spoken by slaves who escaped to that place from the coast and founded their own communities. Palenquero is slowly dying, it seems at this point, and it was only actually discovered in the early 1970s. But it is there.
Then, in the Philippines, there are Spanish creoles. Many of them seem to be in danger, but they are there. They seem to be a kind of a dialect complex, so they’re not completely separate languages. They seem to be variations on one thing, but the variation is pretty wide. And so they are there.
Then in the United States, there is a new dialect of Spanish forming that has a great many English words and some influence from English grammar. That’s all that Spanglish is. We associate it with the nitty gritty of real life, and how people evaluate these things, and the Spanish we’ve seen on the page. But really, a Martian looking [at this from afar] would say there’s a new kind of Spanish mixing in new ways, just like Media Lengua did, just like Papiamento and Palenquero and the Philippine creoles did. Now there’s this new Spanish.
So that is what Spanish is. Spanish starts out, we want to remember, as one of a bunch of variations on Latin that happened to form in Europe, which is only considered a continent because such big stuff went down there. If you look at a map, Europe actually is just one part of Eurasia. It’s just a peninsula really. But if we’re gonna call Europe a continent, then Spanish was just one version of Latin that happened in one little part of what is really just one little peninsula of Asia. And so, that happens to have spread because of unusual colonial proclivities of its people a long time ago. (Just think of Spain: what Spain is now, and what Spain was then. There was a time when the Spanish and the Portuguese ruled the world. Truly amazing. It’s a fun fact.)
But in any case, that’s all that Spanish was. Now it’s spread all over the place, and of course it’s changed. All sorts of varieties of Spanish bleed into varieties of other things. And then you’ve got creoles that are affected by other languages to varying extents.
Other Languages
Portuguese exists, not only in Portugal, but in Brazil, and Africa, and south and southeast Asia. And then the one in Brazil has semi-creole varieties. The Brazilian Portuguese of most people in Brazil is quite different from the continental Portuguese that one might learn in a book.
And then there are various Portuguese creoles and they exist on the west coast of Africa, they exist in India (and a lot more than one), and then there are various ones in Indonesia. All of these vary in terms of how Portuguese they are, how indigenous they are. And this is a reality for a great many “languages” in the world. I could say the same sorts of things about Dutch and German in particular. All people speak complex varieties of language. They differ in a clinal, continuum sense from one another, and are often very difficult to assign to tidy classes.
But this is the wonder of what language is really like.