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Ilan Stavans discusses the future of Spanglish, the hybrid tongue spoken by millions of Latinos in the United States.

Listen to a complementary interview with Ilan Stavans on Thoughcast.org, a podcast and public radio interview program on authors, academics and intellectuals.

Ilan Stavans, a descendant of Eastern European Jews who settled in Mexico, grew up in a mulitlingual environment. Over ten years of research, Stavans has collected some 6,000 Spanglish terms and explores the socio-linguistic history of this vehicle of communication in his controversial new book Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language, which has been at the heart of a heated debate in the Hispanic world. In its last section, Stavans offers a translation into Spanglish of the first chapter of Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes. Ilan Stavans' other award-winning books include The Hispanic Condition (1995), The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (1998), On Borrowed Words (2001), and The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (2003). Stavans is also the editor of the three-volume set of Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories (2004).