Over 40 million Americans speak Spanish. This figure eclipses the individual populations of every country in Latin America except Mexico and Colombia, and it is roughly equivalent to the current population of Spain. Of the estimated 34 million Americans over five years old who speak Spanish at home, 25 million also report speaking English 'well' (6.4 million) or 'very well' (18.8 million). By 2050, the number of Americans who self-identify as Hispanic is likely to surpass 130 million. In broad strokes, these facts paint a clear picture: Spanish is, and will continue to be, a defining element of our national linguistic identity. In order to better understand the current role of Spanish in American life, and in order to predict how it may evolve in the future, it is essential to study the linguistic effects of two forces shaping its use today. First, Spanish and English are spoken alongside each other on a massive scale. Second, the many different varieties of the Spanish language found across the globe are present in a condensed setting in the United States. This means that individuals who might rarely interact with speakers outside of their own communities in Latin America are, throughout the U.S., in frequent contact with speakers whose national and regional origins are different from their own.
This project studies the outcomes of these two kinds of linguistic contact (known as language and dialect contact, respectively) among Spanish speaking residents of Boston, MA. The analysis focuses on two linguistic features as they occur in spontaneous speech: (1) subject pronouns (the Spanish equivalent of words like 'I', 'you', and 'we') and (2) the acoustic properties of the speech sound 's'. Patterns of variation in these features are akin to linguistic fingerprints, uniquely relatable to individuals and communities. Current research on Spanish in other American locales indicates that these features are, unlike fingerprints, susceptible to change. Tracking and understanding the nature of such change bears directly on a host of issues relevant to Spanish in the United States as well as linguists' general understanding of contact-induced language change. These include the maintenance of Spanish across immigrant generations, the potential influence of English on the grammatical structure of Spanish and vice versa, the persistence or erosion of dialect differences in contact situations, and the timescale of language change. In addition to speech data, the project also collects and analyzes speakers' personal linguistic histories. These include their descriptions of when, how, and with whom they acquired and use Spanish as well as their attitudes towards and use of English in their daily lives. Together these data will create a rich profile of Spanish in Boston that promises to increase understanding of how Spanish is used in the United States, particularly in the large urban areas in which most Americans live.
