Linguistic and cultural authenticity of ‘Spanglish’ greeting cards
Past scholarly work has examined commercial greeting cards as an important cultural practice. The growing presence in the USA of bilingual greeting cards offers a site for understanding public uses of contact varieties of language. This paper analyses the reactions of 30 college educated US-raised bilingual Latinos to 17 intrasententially codeswitched Spanish–English greeting cards. Despite a few exceptions, there were correlations between the felicitousness of the codeswitches and their acceptability ratings. Hill's concept of ‘mock Spanish’ helps explain participants’ reactions to the infelicitously codeswitched (IC) cards, although these cards are produced for (and presumably by) bilinguals rather than Anglos. The IC cards can be understood as a distortion of authentic bilingual practices in a failed attempt to reflect and/or shape Latino linguistic practices.