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and, in some parts of the world, language academies – that record and sometimes regulate speech. Nevertheless, the complexities of modern life do not alter the fact that we humans have always used the linguistic resources we have at hand, to ignore or to blend as we wish or as the social situation and group practices demand, all the while putting one foot in front of the next.
    In yet another way, we are taking a cue from Whitney's lead. He was, among other things, committed to educating the general public about linguistic matters, and this was a commitment that linguists lost, more or less, in the twentieth century. We take up the challenge – alongside many other linguists working today – to use the fruits of the last 150 years of language study to promote greater awareness of language in thegeneral public. We hope the readers of this book will also respond to this challenge. We take as a pertinent model the efforts of sociolinguist, Walt Wolfram, at North Carolina State University who, for the past several decades, has brought language awareness out of the university classroom and into public spaces, including the North Carolina State Fair and the curriculum of North Carolina public schools. In our own efforts to create language awareness in the general public, we the authors are just getting started.
The Structure of Spanglish
    Words in a language stand out in a way other features often do not. We can look words up in dictionaries, and we can hear borrowed words if they have an unusual sound or sound sequence. For instance, English speakers recognize Spanish words like mañana with its palatal nasal [ɲ] and yo quiero with the tapped [r]. If we limited our study of language to lexical items, then we might imagine that Spanglish is spoken when any English speaker or Spanish speaker peppers his or her native language with words from the neighboring language. Indeed, most people in the United States are familiar with the terms lasso , rodeo , enchilada , fajita , and cilantro , which come into American English from Mexican Spanish. At the same time, Spanish speakers talk about golf , email , jazz , marketing , and música pop. This of course does make these groups Spanglish speakers. Spanglish speakers obviously make use of the lexicon of both languages – and the degree to which they do this varies – but Spanglish is about more than words. In addition to the lexicon, we also mean to emphasize the variable arrays of linguistic elements speakers use to create a new language variety. These elements are what we call linguistic structure, and they may pertain to the following:
    (i) The sounds of a language, or phonetics . The sound inventories of all languages are limited to the physical and mechanical possibilities of human anatomy: the length of the vocal tract, the size and shape of the oral and nasal cavities, the range of movement of the tongue, and the location of the articulators. Nevertheless, languages differ with respect to the number and types of sounds they produce. The Austroasiatic language Sedang spoken in Vietnam and Laos is said to have as many as 50 unique vowels, while the Caucasian language Abkhaz, spoken in Georgia and Turkey, is said to have just two. Rotokas, a language of Papua New Guinea, is known for having only six consonants, while the language !Xóõ, spoken in southern Africa, has more than 100. And languages that produce the so-called same consonant may do so in subtly different ways. For example, Spanish and English both produce the sound [d], but while the English version is made by placing the tongue tip on the back of the alveolar ridge, the Spanish version is made by placing the tongue on the back of the teeth.
    In the case of Spanglish, speakers may demonstrate pronunciations that are distinctive from those found in monolingual varieties of English and Spanish. Part of what may make Spanglish phonetically distinctive are its patterns of rhythm,