In exploring the formation of Spanglish award-winning essayist Ilan Stavans reflects on and also codifies the most transforming linguistic phenomena in America in the last one hundred years -- one that may predict our future as a nation and that of our entire hemisphere. No tool is more useful in understanding the changes in culture than language. In today s America communication is built around inclusion and efficiency and this is no more apparent than in the blending of the two most spoken languages in the United States: English and Spanish. Spanish the nation s unofficial second language is immediately obvious and audible on airwaves and media screens streets and classrooms from one coast to the other. But el espa? ol has not spread on this side of the Atlantic in its unadulterated Iberian form. Instead it is metastasizing into something altogether new: an astonishingly creative code of communication known as Spanglish which in large part is the result of sweeping demographic changes globalization and the newly emergent Latin Fever that is sweeping the country. It is used predominantly by people of Hispanic descent but is also embraced by others in the United States the Americas as a whole and even Spain. Naturally controversial Spanglish outrages English-language-only proponents who seek to ban all languages other than English north of the Rio Grande. Equal in their outrage are Spanish-language purists and the supporters of