Contact and coherence: Dialectal leveling and structural convergence in NYC Spanish

Abstract

The sustained and intense interaction of massive groups of English and Spanish speakers in the U.S. has the potential to deepen our understanding of continuity and innovation in linguistic systems under heavy contact. The current study focuses on Spanish as it is spoken in the largest urban center of the United States: New York City. It examines a range of variable phenomena in the most extensive collection of Spanish in New York to date: the Otheguy Zentella Corpus of Spanish in NYC (OZC). The data represent original research by the first author as well as the efforts of several other scholars who have examined aspects of the OZC in detail. When synthesized, results reveal two broad patterns in the Spanish of long-time NYC residents: diminished regional differentiation and structural convergence with English. These trends emerge across numerous levels of linguistic structure, manifesting in patterns of syntactic, morphological, and phonological variation.The coherence of these phenomena is consistent with the view that contact-induced change is tightly constrained, both socially and structurally, and that it is unlikely to manifest as haphazard bricolage. This is because, while the intensity of linguistic innovations and the time required for their onset and implementation may vary from feature to feature, such changes derive ultimately from a single source; namely, the set of linguistic and social factors that characterize the contact situation. As such, we can expect contact-induced changes to be restricted and of a kind, imbued with the character of the whole to which they belong.