For a long time, purists have sought to stop the spread of Spanglish. They have described it as a pest, looking for ways to “correct” its speakers’ uncivilized parlance. For instance, in 1991 the Prince of Asturias Award, perhaps the most important cultural award in the Spanish-speaking world, was given to the people of Puerto Rico, “whose representative authorities, with exemplary decisiveness, have declared Spanish to be the only official language of the country.”

Likewise, the 2014 edition of the dictionary published by the Royal Spanish Academy, the watchdog of Spanish language usage, included 19,000 “Americanisms,” which are terms used by Latin American speakers of Spanish. A large percentage of those words are “Anglicisms” because they come from English. Common examples are “congresional” (congressional), “dron” (drone) and “nube informática” (iCloud).

What makes this edition of the dictionary a source of ridicule in Puerto Rico in particular is that just a few Anglicisms made it in, which means that the island’s parlance still remains largely beyond the purview of the academics who put together the lexicon. Buddy is “el broki.” And an invoice is “el cheque.” These simple terms aren’t registered in the prestigious lexicon, which means the joyful, exuberant Puerto Rican tongue was ignored.

It is time we stop this condescending approach to Spanglish. Puerto Ricans are proof of the durability of the phenomenon. In fact, we must see Spanglish as a new language. While it’s still not standardized, millions of speakers use it every day, creating their own syntactic rules. Looking down at them as barbarous speaks tons.

Curiously, while enjoying every sound San Juan had to offer, I kept on thinking of Yiddish, another “bastardized” tongue. Yiddish started as a mix of German and Hebrew, to which all sorts of other elements have been added over the centuries. At first it was spoken by women and children, so it was looked down upon by Talmudists and the educated elite as unworthy of serious consideration. But by the 19th century, Yiddish writers like Sholem Aleichem, author of “Tevye and His Daughters,” on which the Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof” was based, became best-selling authors. And in 1978, Isaac Bashevis Singer, among the most important writers of the 20th century, received the Nobel Prize in Literature for bringing the “universal human condition to life” in Yiddish.

Spanglish is transitioning from the oral to the written form, as novels, plays, movies, poetry, TV shows, translations, sermons and speeches are delivered in it. And it is already defining the future of the Americas. I will not be surprised if a Nobel is given in the next few decades to a Spanglish author whose oeuvre will need to be translated into Spanish and English to be fully understood by non-Spanglish speakers.

During my visit to San Juan, a performance artist assured me that U.F.O.s, if they ever land on the planet, would probably choose this island. He said it was unlikely that extraterrestrials would visit epicenters like Washington or other United States cities because they would get the executive order forbidding their entrance. In Puerto Rico, on the other hand, they will feel most welcome. They will also have a chance to appreciate the audacity of the population: “No hay money, time runs muy slow, but hey, la gente es super cool.”