Spanglish in the US, Belize and Gibraltar: On the Importance of Comparative Research

Even though it has been previously suggested that Spanglish is not exclusive to the US, research on this sociolinguistic phenomenon has focused on the US Hispanophone context, thus providing a limited understanding of how the US compares to Belize and Gibraltar, two language contact situations where Spanglish is also attested. This paper fills this gap by bringing together insights from scholarship on these three contexts where Spanish has been in prolonged contact with English. To this end, this article highlights some of the key debates and discussions regarding Spanglish. It also introduces the reader to some similarities between the US, Belize and Gibraltar and posits that there are Spanglish phenomena, which necessarily entail the reevaluation of the role that structural hybridity plays in Spanglish. Lastly, through an overview of comparative analyses that have been conducted more recently, we illustrate the importance of this work in elucidating our knowledge of the remarkable patterns of uniformity and variability that characterize the dynamic nature of Spanglish varieties in different parts of the world today.