"Mock Spanish: a site for the indexical reproduction of racism in American English."

Published on the World-Wide Web: www./uchicago.edu/l-c/html/archives/subs/hill-jane

Hill uses the term Mock Spanish to refer to Spanish-origin or Spanish-emulating linguistic forms as used by English speakers. Examples of this include expressions such as hasta banana and Fleas Navidad. Hill points out that Mock Spanish is not only prevalent but considered harmless and even flattering by many of its users. However, native Spanish speakers are likely to find it insulting.

Through several examples which take advantage of the paper's hypertext format, Hill demonstrates that Mock Spanish can only be accurately interpreted if negative stereotypes about Hispanophones can be accessed. She outlines four strategies which occur in the borrowing of words from Spanish into Mock Spanish:

(1) semantic derogation, in which a positive or neutral Spanish word becomes a derogatory term in Mock Spanish;

(2) euphemism, in which negatively charged words from Spanish are borrowed into Mock Spanish as euphemisms for their English equivalents;

(3) affixation of Spanish grammatical elements to result in non-Spanish forms; and

(4) hyperanglicization and bold mispronunciation of Spanish borrowings.

Hill demonstrates clearly that Mock Spanish depends on covertly indexing negative stereotypes of Spanish speakers. This is in contrast to similar borrowngs from French, which often depend on the knowledge of prestige or classiness. Consider a restaurant called Le Cove, compared to one called El Cove. The former conjures up images of snobbery, the latter dinginess. The productivity of Mock Spanish, particularly among white college-educated Americans, provides evidence for what Hill refers to as a new kind of elite racist discourse.

[This line of work by Prof. Jane Hill has been influential on research into the African American community, including the work on "Mock Ebonics: Linguistic racism in parodies of Ebonics on the internet", by Maggie Ronkin and Helen Karn, which was first presented to this AAVE seminar and is in Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(3):360-79]