The Interaction of Language and Dialect Contact: Variable Expression of Spanish Subject Pronouns in Six Spanish Dialects in New York City

Cuny Graduate School University Center, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Spanish speakers in New York City (NYC) are experiencing language and dialect contact on an unusually large scale. This project investigates the consequences of such contact through a sociolinguistic study of the alternation between presence and absence of subject personal pronouns (SPPs) with finite verbs in Spanish. We ask whether Spanish dialects are undergoing leveling or hyperdifferentiation and/or whether they are converging with English. Leveling may indicate the rise of a NYC Spanish, suggestive of a new NYC Latino identity; hyperdifferentiation may suggest the emergence of transnational identities that tie immigrants and language minorities to their distant communities of origin more than to speakers of other dialects in the immigrant setting. The data come from interviews with informants from the six largest Spanish-speaking communities in NYC. Our informants have resided in NYC for varying numbers of years, have arrived in NYC at different ages, have varied levels of English and Spanish proficiency, and diverse educational and socioeconomic backgrounds. The study is conducted within the variationist sociolinguistic paradigm, and provides a detailed, explicit quantitative model of leveling, hyperdifferentiation, and English contact. We compare recently arrived Latinos whose activities are mostly within their own communities with more established Latinos who interact frequently with members of other dialect groups, distinguishing in the latter those who know little English from those that speak it well. We study the predictive power of membership in a particular dialect on the occurrence of overt SPPs in speakers with these different profiles, and ask how they differ in rates of overt SPPs, in the constraints that condition their use, and in the strengths of the constraints.