Junot Diaz and Nerd-Speak

In his interview with splicetoday.com, Junot Diaz talks about the roles nerd-speak and Spanish take on in his book The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Here, Diaz is surprised that his mainstream readers are more “rubbed” by his use of Spanish than his use of nerd-speak. The use of nerd-speak, he explains, is way more prevalent than his use Spanish, and is annoyed by “America’s long tradition of anti-Hispanic bias and nativism that makes Spanish so problematic.” It is quite amazing that the second most common language of America, spoken fluently by 12% of the population, becomes such a problem to American readers.

But are such genres even more common than Spanish? There is no doubt that books and movies like Harry Potter and Twilight have become, dare I say, cool to read and watch? The sales of black plastic-rimmed glasses have skyrocketed in the past 5 years(see graph). Have these series made it cool to be a dork? I’ve noticed that even my friends and I have stopped caring about how loud we speak about the Final Fantasy Franchise, or how much we look forward to the Zombie apocalypse.
Junot Diaz has a right to be pissed off about people’s problem with the Spanish in his text. Wikipedia does not have a statistic showing the percentage of the population that speak Elvish, but if they did, by God, that number better not be over 12%!