E-ging Solutions is a world-leading Shanghai translation company with specialties in Spanish translation.
Due to some recent hype in the language service industry about the existence of a specific American variety of Spanish, we decided that it was worth taking a look at the validity of such a major linguistic claim. Some language service companies already offer document translation from English into what they’re calling “US Spanish.” Below are some examples of words that might be considered US Spanish:
rufo meaning roof and replacing techo
bosa meaning boss and replacing jefe or patrón
ganga meaning gang and replacing pandilla or banda
An official corpus to standardize a US form of the Spanish language does not yet exist in the same way that it does for Latin American Spanish and European Spanish. There are no courses or certifications offered in US Spanish, and linguistics scholars still consider the words in the examples above to be “Spanglish,” or more technically a phenomenon called lexico-semantic fusion.
The American Authority on the Spanish Language
The North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE) is often cited in affirmations about the existence of US Spanish. A close look at the organization’s mission statement confirms that they strive to maintain proper use of traditional Spanish terms for use in the United States, which would eliminate the high instance of false cognates used between English and Spanish. Alternatively, a look at their current projects showed that the ANLE plans to produce a concise list of US Spanish terms to submit for recognition by the Royal Spanish Academy, the world’s official authority on the Spanish language based in Madrid, Spain.
The Future of US Spanish
It seems that some efforts are underway to modernize the existing corpus – but are those changes enough to bring about the legitimization of brand new standard language? It doesn’t seem like it – at least not yet.
