Spanglish: A Review Ilan Stavans, HarperCollins American Standard English is rather oxymoronic. In only a few environments is a perceived “standard” dialect used in America. There have been several non-standard varieties gaining public attention, one being Ebonics, illuminated in Geneva Smitherman’s Black Talk, published in 1994. The most recent American linguistic phenomenon to get this treatment is the mixed Spanish and English, studied by Amherst professor Ilan Stavans in Spanglish: The making of a new American language. Stavans’s reflection on this intermingling, or “encounter” as Stavans prefers, of the two languages was not at first received warmly. Before the publishing of Spanglish, Stavans taught a course called “The Sounds of Spanglish” at Amherst College on the new language. Although only about fifteen students were in class, news of its offering spread like wildfire throughout Spanish-speaking North America. The Puerto Rico Herald noted in January, 2001, that many interested in freeing Spanish from corruption of the English language (and those who wanted English free of Spanicisms) were in no way interested in celebrating Spanglish as Stavans called it, “the poetry of the people”. Spanglish, as with Ebonics, inspires rare middle ground. Mexican Nobel Prize for Literature winner Octavio Paz is reported to describe Spanglish as, “neither good nor bad but abominable”. In 1981, Ana Lydia Vega wrote “Pollito Chicken”, what Stavans calls, “to the best of my knowledge, then, the first full-fledged Spanglish story”. When first published, Vega was accused of chauvinism; she eventually renounced the story. In Stavans’s class, the reaction to the reading of story was mixed, and for some of the Latino class members the reaction was offense. The Madrid-based Real Academia Española de la Lengua Castellana, charged with safeguarding Spanish in its purest form, does not recognize Spanglish as even a mere dialect. Although Spanglish exists whether Stavans chronicles it or not, his own attempt at providing a documentary of Spanglish fails to fully characterize the beauty of it that he expounds upon. Stavans uses Spanglish at length throughout the book, leaving me in confusion on many occasions. And most controversially, Stavans ends the short work with a near 200 page dictionary of Spanglish terms. Although he credits Samuel Johnson, author of The Dictionary of the English Language, as an idol, Stavans spends most of Spanglish questioning the validity of dictionaries, labelling the Real Academia’s six-volume Spanish dictionary published in 1740 “famously disappointing”. To credit Stavans, he acknowledges early on in Spanglish Johnson’s own statement that, “the worst [dictionary] is better than none”. Still, it seems questionable to present a dictionary in this setting. In fact, I hardly skimmed it. A language such as Spanglish is used primarily outside of the realm where dictionaries apply. More so, a dictionary can be likened to taking a photograph, where those photographed live beyond the timeframe of the photograph itself. Eventually, those in the photograph are a bare resemblance, having aged, changed, moved on, grown, et cetera. Stavans can be commended for having written Spanglish considering the inevitable backlash before and after publishing. However, I would have preferred abandoning the lexicon for a keener microscope on a dynamic language that has gone essentially unchecked for decades. As I navigated his brief historical discussions of the Spanish language and reactions to Spanglish today, flooded with itinerant Spanglish words, I grew weary. For Spanglish to enrage and arouse as it does, Stavans shouldn’t expect that reaction. J. Everett R.