Try ordering a coffee in Mexico City while asking a friend to "downloadear" a file, and you'll be speaking perfectly current Spanish — even if a purist winces. Technology has pushed a wave of English words into everyday Mexican speech, and rather than borrow them as-is, speakers do something rather elegant: they fit English roots onto Spanish verb endings. The result is a growing family of conjugated Anglicisms like hackear, rebootear and bloguear.
The mechanics are straightforward. Spanish regular verbs end in -ar, -er or -ir, and English imports almost always take the -ear form, conjugating like standard -ar verbs such as canjear (to trade) or crear (to create). There's no official rule behind the choice — speakers simply converged on it. The alternatives that already exist in proper Spanish carry awkward baggage: descargar technically means "download," but also "unload"; arrancar covers "boot up" alongside starting an engine, ripping something out or kicking things off. Little wonder the snappier English-derived versions won out.
Even the Real Academia Española — the often-ignored but undisputed authority on the language — has started paying attention. Googlear now sits on its list of Observed Words, albeit marked provisional, with the Academy suggesting the spelling guglear instead. Good luck getting anyone to use it.
The borrowing doesn't stop at verbs. Email routinely beats out correo electrónico, and DVDs are pronounced the English way — with di-vi-di doubling as shorthand for a DVD player. Sports terms have long since crossed over too: fútbol, béisbol and básquetbol are everyday words in Mexico, where the stress lands on the final syllable and the accented spellings are often dropped, while the homegrown alternatives balompié and baloncesto still circulate.
Not everyone is delighted. Critics see the flood of Anglicisms as an extension of US cultural influence across Latin America and beyond — though, as the source dryly notes, some of the loudest complainers can be spotted heading into Hollywood films or chatting about them on the way to Starbucks. The contradiction is part of the charm.
For travellers, the practical takeaway is reassuring: Mexican Spanish is friendlier to English speakers than the textbooks suggest. Ask someone to "chequear" your reservation or send you an "email" and you'll be understood. Listen closely and you'll pick up dozens of these hybrid words — a small, living lesson in how language actually evolves when two cultures share a very long border.
Full story: Mexperience.
