Submitted on Monday, 3/1/2021, at 2:21 PM

“[Spanglish] is the fastest growing hybrid language in the world,” says Stavans in a recent video for NBCLX. “I would say it is the most important linguistic phenomenon in the Hispanic world, in the Spanish-speaking world, and in the English-speaking world.”

Stavans, the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst, is quoted, along with many other scholars and media personalities, about the growing phenomenon of Spanglish, a blend of Spanish and English dating back to the 19th century and now spoken across the United States, especially by Latinx immigrants and their children and grandchildren. Spanglish appears today in popular music, in advertising campaigns and on television news programs.

Stavans is the author of the 2003 book Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language and has taught a course on Spanglish in past semesters—making Amherst one of the growing number of colleges and universities, as mentioned in the video, that include Spanglish in their curricula.