Viva La Kalle!

On my recent trip to New York I found myself not only hearing but also using Spanish within a few hours of arriving. Once again proof to me that Spanish is emerging not just as the 'second language' of America but increasingly, in some areas and in some contexts, as a 'co-language', a partner - and maybe rival - to the dominant.

The Puerto Rican driver of the shuttle bus to my hotel was listening to 'La Kalle', a new radio station aimed at the 16-25 demographic of Hispanic Americans living in the New York region.

Interspersed with reggaetón music, the talk on the station is in both Spanish and English, with no clear line of demarcation between the languages. The announcers move in and out of the two idiomas, weaving them into one radio language, a hybrid production entirely accessible to millions of today's Americans, reflecting their everyday experience living in - and between - two languages.

Listening to 'La Kalle', the whole idea of a language as a single system with a grammar and a set of rules seems to crumble. The shifts between Spanish and English may be at the end of a sentence, in the middle of one, or just on the turn of a single word or phrase.

Having listened to the station a bit more on the Internet since my visit, I have given up trying to analyse or predict when a 'shift' or 'switch' will be made. After some time I actually stop noticing, the combining of languages becomes so embedded and natural. And a great help for me in improving my Spanish! (And thinking differently about English....).

Hablamos Los Dos

As I listen to 'La Kalle', I am thinking of the question: 'Why do people switch languages?'. We might look to situational and functional explanations, or personal choices, or political affinities. But I wonder if some 'switching' is more a kind of creativity; an interlacing or meshing, a way of bringing supposedly separate things together into one form of production through the medium of the spoken voice, and making relationships of style.

In some of the talk on 'La Kalle', every utterance is like a bridge thrown between one language and another. There may not be a 'reason' to change language except to keep the discourse in touch with its partner, its parallel-idioma.

A few years ago I read Ann Celia Zentella's book Growing Up Bilingual, a study of New York-Puerto Rican children's bilingual styles of speech. She suggested in her study that almost half of all switches were to do with identity and not with function or situation. For the children in her study, mixing - or meshing -English and Spanish was about having 'a foot in both worlds':

Because they had a foot in both worlds, they never spoke in one for very long without acknowledging and incorporating the other, especially in informal speech. (Zentella, 120)

My inquisitiveness on the shuttle bus listening to the female announcer on 'La Kalle' eventually got the better of me.

'Cuando ella cambia la idioma?' ['When does she change language?']

'Porqué pregunta usted?' ['Why do you ask?']

'Yo soy estudiante de lenguas. Me interesa, cómo cambian tanto....' ['I am a student of languages. It interests me, how much they change..']

'Pero, eso es normal. Hablamos los dos. 'La Kalle', lo han hecho para nosotros'. ['But, this is normal. We speak both. They have done it - La Kalle - for us.']

La Kalle, Nueva Yorka