English and Spanish are two of the world’s most widely spoken languages, with a combined total of nearly two billion speakers across the globe. They are also two languages with a long history of contact and mutual influence, as evidenced by the large number of words that each has borrowed from the other over the centuries.
The influx of Spanish-origin words into American English began in the 19th century, when the westward expansion of the US, along with the presence of English-speaking settlers in Hispanic areas in the American Southwest, gave rise to so-called ‘cowboy language’, exemplified by such words as vaquero (and its Anglicized variant buckaroo), bronco, chaps, lasso, and rodeo. This period saw a shift in the patterns of lexical borrowing between the two languages—before the 19th century, English Hispanicisms were largely borrowed from peninsular Spanish to British English; after the 19th century, they became mostly American Spanish words absorbed directly into American English. It was during this time that such everyday words as…
