The Spanglish Project
The Spanish of the English speaking world
Spanglish is the best known of all the migrant languages and the least evenly recorded. The United States has shelves of scholarship on it. Australia, with Spanish speaking communities from Latin America and Spain settled since the 1970s, has almost none. The Spanglish Project records the words wherever they were made, with Australia given the same standing as the United States, and opens as a consultation for the same reason the Italian project does.
What is known
Carmen Silva-Corvalán's study of Spanish in Los Angeles, Ana Celia Zentella's of Puerto Rican children in New York, John Lipski's survey of the varieties of Spanish in the United States and Ricardo Otheguy and Nancy Stern's argument about the word Spanglish itself are the foundations, with Ilan Stavans's dictionary the popular reference. For Australia the record is thin: Michael Clyne's national survey covers Spanish among many languages, and we have not located a dedicated lexical study. If one exists, we want to hear about it. The works are on the Research page, each marked as not yet checked word by word for this dictionary.
Why it opens as a question
The project is led by a Greek Australian who does not speak Spanish as a mother tongue. That is why this page asks rather than announces. The Spanglish Project begins with three requests to its communities, in Australia first and everywhere Spanish speakers settled among English: name the dictionary, send the words, and put forward the editors and advisers who will sign it off.
How it will work
The same method as To Booko: every entry traceable, no invented spellings, communities kept apart and shown together, disputes recorded, contributors credited by name. One difference is deliberate. Because the American record is so large, the dictionary will not let it stand in for everyone else's; a word recorded only in Fairfield or Melbourne is as much an entry as a word recorded in Los Angeles. The method in full and how the consultation works.
Where the project lives
The working site, where you can vote on a name and send a word, is at spanglishproject.com. To join as an editor or adviser, use the form on the consultation page.