Spanish in Chicago

Abstract

Abstract This is the first book-length study of Spanish in Chicago, a site where Spanish is a minority language in contact with dominant English. The book’s goal is to describe the oral Spanish of Chicago-based Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and MexiRicans across three generations, identify patterns of change, and propose explanations for them. It describes what happens when speakers who use different varieties of Spanish come into contact with one another in Chicago. The study contributes to discussions of possible language or dialect contact outcomes such as linguistic convergence, dialect leveling, accommodation, and language loss. The book starts with an introduction to the history of the Puerto Rican and Mexican communities in Chicago, including histories of settlement, shifting demographics, contact and engagement, and mutual social and linguistic attitudes. It features an analysis of five linguistic features: lexical familiarity, proportional use of so versus entonces, number of codeswitches and percentage of English use, production of subjunctive morphology in obligatory and variable contexts, and two phonological features, the weakening of coda /s/ and the velarization of /r̄/. The analyses consider the role of proficiency and generation in the production of all five of these features. The book then offers an extensive discussion of the factors that underlie the development of diverse Spanish proficiency levels within Latino Chicago and offers suggestions for how to promote Spanish language vitality across generations in the future. The book’s findings are compared to other foundational studies of Spanish in the U.S.

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