Tongue twister: English or español?

LOS ANGELES — Cuban-born Maria Carreira, co-author of two college Spanish textbooks, can glide easily between her native tongue and English. But picking which language to speak can be very "complicado."

Such as the time she was at a taco stand where everyone seemed to be ordering and chatting in Spanish. Carreira started placing her order "en español," but she quickly switched to English after she saw the young employee behind the counter.

"He had the bluest eyes," Carreira said.

Carreira, who teaches at California State University, Long Beach, and an expert in the use of Spanish in the United States, acknowledged she blundered at the taco joint. Although the counterman responded in English, it dawned on her that he had been capably handling orders in Spanish.

Yet her flub reflects a language-etiquette question confronted daily by the nation's growing ranks of English-Spanish bilinguals: When to use "inglés" and when to speak Spanish?

Not everyone is charmed by the budding bilingualism. Some Americans resent widespread use of Spanish, particularly at government agencies and public schools. "Our government has gone way too far in encouraging people not to learn English," said Jim Boulet Jr., executive director of Springfield, Va.-based English First, a group working to make English the nation's official language.

Still, among the estimated 18 million Americans proficient in both languages, according to the U.S. Census in September, the issue isn't whether to speak English or Spanish, but when. There's the delicate matter of courtesy — and avoiding bruised feelings. Occasionally, Carreira said, "it's a land mine."

For example, switching to Spanish might seem rude if it suggests the other speaker is inept in English. Yet, among Hispanics proud of their ethnic heritage, avoiding Spanish can come across as standoffish.

Experts such as Carreira say the language decision among bilinguals often is made in a split second, based on cues such as age, clothing and apparent social status, along with skin, eye and hair color.

Names can be giveaways — or traps. When University of California, Los Angeles, student Maricruz Cecena called to introduce herself with a friendly "hola" to one of her freshman-year dormitory roommates, Laura Sanchez, she tried to strike up a phone conversation in Spanish; in response, Cecena got an earful of English.

Cecena, a child of Mexican immigrants who grew up speaking Spanish, had assumed too much.

Sanchez can get by fairly well in Spanish but is much more comfortable in English, the primary language in her upper-middle-class Mexican-American home. She said she sometimes is intimidated by friends and acquaintances who speak Spanish better than she does.

"You don't want them to see that you don't speak as well," Sanchez said, calling the quality of her Spanish a "very personal" issue.

Despite the initial awkward moments, Sanchez and Cecena remain friends three years later. But they do that, in part, by keeping conversations in English.

As with all etiquette, making the other person comfortable is key.

K.C. McAlpin recalls making small talk recently with a night-crew janitor from Central America working at his office.

The conversation started in English, but McAlpin, who grew up in Texas and worked in Latin America in the 1970s, decided to help the janitor when "she got hung up on some word." The conversation then resumed in Spanish.

The location for their chat? The Arlington, Va., headquarters of ProEnglish, another group that promotes making English the nation's official language. McAlpin is the group's executive director.

Although Carreira regrets the incident with the blue-eyed counterman, she has a finely honed sense of Spanish-English etiquette that leads her to use Spanish sparingly in public, unless she is approached in Spanish.

Say Carreira needs directions and bumps into somebody who appears Hispanic. She'll ask in English and stick with the language even if the other person speaks with a heavy accent. Switching quickly to Spanish, Carreira reasons, would be "sort of saying, 'Huh, I get it. You can't speak English.' "

But by refusing to speak Spanish, "you also risk coming across as aloof or superior, more Americanized, or not one of them," she said.

The solution?

Carreira will continue an exchange in English to avoid insult but will toss in a well-pronounced "gracias" or "por favor" as "a way of being gracious and showing solidarity."

Among Hispanics, trying a little Spanish sometimes can defuse hostility. Ana Celia Zentella, an ethnic-studies professor at the University of California, San Diego, and author of the 1997 book "Growing Up Bilingual," said she had found in her research that older U.S. Hispanics often "think they're being lied to" when they encounter young Hispanics who say they don't know the language.

English-speakers struggling to use a few words of Spanish can, in some circumstances, come across very well. "There are people who are very touched when there is a genuine approach to them by people who are trying to speak Spanish to communicate and to connect with them," Zentella said.

But all too often, she said, English-speakers offend with fractured "mock Spanish" that she considers racist, including "no problemo" and "comprendee?"

Being too eager with Spanish brings another kind of hazard.

Brian Ghiglia, a mediator based in the San Fernando Valley, has become a competent Spanish-speaker by studying on and off since high school. "I speak Spanish when I can, because I love to do it and I love to practice," he said.

When he was in his 20s and in a celebratory mood after a UCLA football game, Ghiglia, now 57, stopped at a gas station and started speaking Spanish "a mile a minute" to a man he assumed was Hispanic.

"He just sort of looked at me like I was a little crazy, because he didn't speak a word of Spanish and very little English," Ghiglia said.

In the increasingly diverse mix that is Southern California, appearances can deceive. Dalton Waters, a security guard who grew up in Nicaragua speaking both languages, is accustomed to startling people with his Spanish. In his case, it's because he's black.

That might not be unusual in Miami or New York, where black Spanish-speakers with roots in Cuba, Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic are common, but it still surprises in Los Angeles.

When someone struggles to ask Waters a question in English and he replies in Spanish, "a lot of times, they jump back," he said.

One recent afternoon, an SUV pulled up while Waters was at his job guarding a parking lot near Universal Studios. The window rolled down, and a middle-age woman in the back seat asked, in accented English, how to get to the tourist attraction.

Waters began answering in English, but, after sensing that no one in the SUV understood him well, he switched languages. The driver and passengers smiled, even though Waters told them a moment later that they weren't supposed to park at his lot.

"Este es para el metro" ("This is for the Metro"), he said, explaining where they could park. Waters then used that other Southern California idiom — Spanglish — to say where they could wait for "el shuttle."