final draft

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

Nely Galan, guest host for a day, and the television actress Liz Torres plop down onto the plump, oversized chairs that dominate the late-night talk show set, and without missing a beat, slip into the language that comes most naturally to both of them.

''Oye, oye, check out those red lips, girlfriend,'' Ms. Galan says.

''Madonna Red,'' Ms. Torres replies, pouting her full lips.

''Madonna Red, una belleza,'' Ms. Galan says. ''You look beautiful.''

''Si, gracias,'' Ms. Torres remarks, returning the compliment. ''Y tu te ves tan linda.''

Ms. Galan tells her late-night audience: ''It's a Latina girlfest. We love makeup.''

Never mind that the talk show, ''Later,'' appears on NBC and is geared to an English-speaking audience. Ms. Galan, born in Cuba and reared in New Jersey, and Ms. Torres, Puerto Rican and raised in Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan, were speaking the hybrid lingo known as Spanglish -- the language of choice for a growing number of Hispanic-Americans who view the hyphen in their heritage as a metaphor for two coexisting worlds.

''I think Spanglish is the future,'' said Ms. Galan, 32, the president of Galan Entertainment, a Los Angeles television and film production company that focuses on the Latino market. ''It's a phenomenon of being from two cultures. It's perfectly wonderful. I speak English perfectly. I speak Spanish perfectly, and I choose to speak both simultaneously. How cool is that?''

Immigrants struggling to learn a new tongue have long relied on a verbal patchwork to communicate in their adopted land. But Spanglish today is far from the awkward pidgin of a newcomer. As millions of Hispanic-Americans, first, second and third generation, take on more prominent roles in business, media and the arts, Spanglish is traveling right along with them.

The headlines of a glossy new magazine aimed at young Hispanic women spout a hip, irreverent Spanglish. Young Hispanic rappers use the dialect in recordings, and poets and novelists are adapting it to serious literary endeavors. Spanglish has few rules and many variations, but at its most vivid and exuberant, it is an effortless dance between English and Spanish, with the two languages clutched so closely together that at times they actually converge. Phrases and sentences veer back and forth almost unconsciously, as the speaker's intuition grabs the best expressions from either language to sum up a thought. Sometimes entirely new words are coined.

Some Spanish-language purists still denounce Spanglish as a debasement of their native tongue. And many Latinos, wary of the Ebonics controversy that flared over the suggestion that black English should be considered a separate language, are unsure just how far they want to push their own hybrid. Many see it as a purely colloquial form of communication best suited to popular culture, and there is little talk of introducing a Spanglish curriculum in schools or demanding that Spanglish be accepted in the workplace.

Most speakers fall into Spanglish only among other bilingual Latinos, and when they do, it is often with a sense of humor. ''If in addition to, quote, 'taking all those good fruit-picking jobs' we then begin bastardizing the language, we are really going to catch it,'' said Christy Haubegger, publisher of Latina magazine. ''We don't need another strike against us.''

But those reservations have not limited Spanglish's popularity. Ms. Haubegger, a Mexican-American lawyer, began Spanglish's most successful foray into the magazine world last June when she started Latina magazine, a bilingual glossy in New York for young Hispanic women. The magazine peppers its stories and headlines with Spanglish. ''When He Says Me Voy . . . What Does He Really Mean?'' one headline reads. (''Me voy'' is ''I'm leaving.'') ''Mi padre's infidelity. Are cuernos genetic?'' another reads. (''Cuernos'' are horns.) The magazine, published six times a year, has been so successful that this summer it will go monthly.

…The much-praised Hispanic writers Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez and Roberto G. Fernandez routinely drop Spanglish into their novels and poetry, believing it to be a legitimate, creative form of communication.

''Language is not a little, airtight, clean, finished container of something,'' said Ms. Alvarez, a Dominican-American author (who is not related to this writer). ''It's permeable, alive. It moves.''

…And in Texas, where some say a Spanish-English hybrid has been around as long as Texas has been Texas, Spanglish -- or Tex-Mex as they call it -- has reached unrivaled levels of acceptance. Towns close to the border resonate with the language.

…Traditionalists have sometimes deplored this ''code-switching'' between languages, often calling it a product of laziness and ignorance. And it is true that as Spanish gets fuzzier to American-born Hispanics, they come to rely on English words to fill the gap. But a new school of thought has recently emerged that says that Spanglish illustrates a high degree of fluency in both languages.''It's a sign of linguistic dexterity,'' said Ana Celia Zentella, a linguist at Hunter College and at the CUNY Graduate Center who has written a book on bilingualism in New York. ''It's like a complex juggling act or a train car able to run on two tracks at the same time, shifting from one to the other at the appropriate time. It's a skill that is often misunderstood.''

Luz de Armas, chief creative officer and managing partner of Conill Advertisers in New York, who said she and her co-workers speak mostly Spanglish among themselves, agreed. She often switches into Spanish, she said, to convey anger, joy, love or embarrassment, because Spanish is a more descriptive, emotional language than English -- not because she doesn't know the word.

That is also true for Ms. Alvarez, the novelist. ''For me, Spanish is my childhood language,'' she said. ''I came to this country when I was 10. It's the language of sensations and emotions, of the day to day.''As with other foreign languages, some Spanish words simply cannot be translated.''English is very concise and efficient,'' said Gustavo Perez Firmat, a Duke University professor and poet who has written a collection of poems called ''Bilingual Blues.'' ''Spanish has sabrosura, flavor.''It is also a statement of identity. ''The reality is, because you do have a constant influx, we don't assimilate, we acculturate,'' said Ms. de Armas, whose parents are from Spain. ''I'm not turning my back on what I came from. You pick and choose and accommodate, and that's what Spanglish is.''