Primera Conference en Spanglish
I saw the announcement for the 1st International Conference on Spanglish and shook my head thinking Oh, no! Not Ilan Stavans again, and hoped that I might be wrong and that there might actually be a serious endeavor behind the announcement. But no: the conference is indeed the brainchild of Stavans, who teaches at Amherst University, in Massachusetts, where the conference will be held in the Spring of 2004.

Lest my position not be clear, I should clarify that there are, to be sure, many reasons why one may wish to study Spanglish (whatever that may be; coming up with an answer to that question could be one of the things one could undertake). I think there are very few subjects, if any, not worth studying. In the case of Spanglish one may wish to document for instance, its usage to ascertain whether we are witnessing a process of creolization. Are native speakers (if the object of study in question has any) using Spanglish differently from their ancestors, and how differently? Is the "syntactic hodgepodge" that Stavans mentions subject to rules or to caprice? Are we just witnessing plain old-fashioned code switching prompted perhaps by lexical deficiencies, or is there any emergent new way of combining the two languages from which Spanglish feeds?

I suppose all these, and many more, could be interesting questions for anyone who cares to study the damn thing, but I don't get the impression Stavans is interested in much of that. As far as I can glean from his manifesto (which at times reads like the digressive exegesis of a madman), words like pidgin and creole don't seem to be part of his vocabulary though people interested in studying these things get exposed to those concepts in an introductory linguistics course (he talks about a "jazzy, hybrid language"; perhaps I'm being unfair). He mentions, however, things like standardization while lashing against the purists (except here he uses the word purista) who oppose Spanglish and prefer to uphold English and Spanish standards (and never, apparently, catches on the irony). Ironic too is that for someone who presumably is interested in empowering the speakers he studies, he has to attribute to them such ill-conceived notion as laziness (you know, the same thing that keeps black people away from grammar books and makes them talk the way they do). He also seems to be intrigued by the non-question of whether Spanglish is a dialect or a language (summoning in the process, as is duly customary in this case, the spirit of poor Max Weinreich who will never rest in peace).

He seems to have a strange agenda (sociopolitical? anthropological? certainly not sociolinguistic: people with that agenda approach their subjects with more formality; sometimes anyways) at the core of which language just happens to play a decisive role. His manifesto also permeates some anticolonialist resentment which, even if well justified, doesn't particularly add any weight to whatever arguments he may think he has.

There is no official call for papers at the conference site. Panelists will, apparently, be selected by invitation. One of the formal areas will on the linguistics of Spanglish. It remains to be seen what this will yield, and whose ideas of linguistics will guide the selection of the material.