For a certain period this summer, the only languages I spoke were Spanish and Korean. Korean, because I am living at home with my parents, who speak very little English and very much Korean. Spanish, because I obtained a job working at an Italian restaurant as a busgirl, and my co-workers happened to be Latin Americans who speak little or no English at all.
Somehow, in a dominantly white, Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking suburb of Philadelphia, I ended up nearly forgetting my grammar rules and mechanisms of the English language as I was immersed into the alternating environments of the Korean household and the Spanish (well, technically Italian) workplace.
One of my co-workers is a native Spanish speaker who has learned English and is picking up bits of Korean at a bar which he likes to frequent. We have conversations in which all three languages are employed in one sentence. We like to call this speak: Korespanglish.
Only in America.
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