For one of our projects in my English class we had a group project on almost anything we wanted involving multilingualism. My group focused on the social pressures that people who do not speak formal English face. The other two members in my group focused on Black English while I focused on Spanglish. We all wrote essays that were similar but were still completely different essays. My essay talks about the different pressures to speak English and Spanish. Through my research I found that in the United States the pressures to speak Spanish generally come from family. Families want to keep the language of their ancestors a live. Many Spanish speakers in America speak Spanish at home with their families. This is done on purpose to preserve the language and the culture of Spanish. On the other side there are pressures from media, friends, teachers and even the government for people o speak English. In public schools there are programs to help students learn English and generally only English is taught in school. The government has a policy where all of the formal government documents are first printed in English and then translated to other languages. Most people who go to school in the United States only speak English with their school friends. The are different pressures to speak both languages for people who speak English and Spanish. From the many pressures Spanglish was born. The mixing of the languages comes from people having pressures to speak both languages so then they mix them. Spanglish is growing rapidly because of the increase in people coming to the USA who are Spanish speaking. People of all different economic background speak this language. Spanglish is a beautiful example of code meshing that is present in many people’s daily lives.
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