Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way

Mambo No. 2: Spic ’n’ Spanish

- 43Mambo No. 2 sPic ’n’ sPanish MiaMi sPanish includes a terM that, so far as I know, is unique to the city of sun and solecisms: nilingüe. Just as a bilingüe is someone who speaks two languages (say, Spanish and English), a nilingüe is someone who doesn’t speak either: “ni espa- ñol, ni inglés.” Such a person is a no-lingual, a nulli-glot. My example of nilingualism is Ricky Ricardo. Ricky’s occasional Spanish utterances are shot through with anglicisms: falta for culpa, introducir for presentar, parientes for padres, and so on. Sometimes the anglicisms seem deliberate (so that the monolingual viewer can understand what he is saying), but at other times they’re plain mistakes. A curious thing: as Ricky got older, his English didn’t get any better, but his Spanish kept getting worse. Equally curious: the same thing happened to Desi Arnaz. In 1983 Arnaz was picked “king” of the Cuban carnival in Miami, Open House Eight. By then, his Spanish was as frail as his health. He now had an accent in two languages. In Spanish to know a language well is to “dominate” it. But my mother tongue has it backwards: people don’t dominate languages; languages dominate people. By reversing the power relation, English comes closer to the truth. When someone speaks English better than Spanish, we say that he is “English-dominant,” an expression in which the language , and not the speaker, has the upper hand. But in Ricky no language achieved dominance; English and Spanish battled each other to a tie (a tongue-tie). A nilingüe treats his mother tongue like a foreign language and treats the foreign language like his other tongue. T. W. Adorno once said: “Only he who is not truly at home inside a language can use it as an instrument.” Ricky Ricardo is a multi-instrumentalist. He is homeless in two languages. ...