Abstract
Immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries bring their varieties of Spanish to the US and contribute to the ongoing development of those varieties in the new setting. In this paper, the variation of syllable final (r) is investigated in a group of Cuban immigrants in Miami. It reports on the linguistic and social factors that constrain variation of four variants (retention, assimilation, lateralization, and aspiration), particularly their generational and social distributions, with the goal of examining factors that contribute to negative perceptions of the island variety among Cubans in Miami (Alfaraz 2002). The findings indicated that the variants of (r) are constrained by a combination of linguistic and social factors, with following phonetic context having the strongest influence on retention, lateralization, and aspiration, but not on assimilation, on which generation had the strongest influence. For the four variants, generational differences were found: the older generation favored retention and aspiration, whereas the younger one favored assimilation and lateralization. The role of this distribution in shaping evaluations of the island variety is discussed.
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