Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 2,0, University of Rostock (Anglistik/ Amerikanistik), course: HS: Contact Linguistics and Mixed-Language Genesis: the Case of English, language: English, abstract: As the topic of this terms seminar „ Contact Linguistics and Mixed-Language Genesis: the Case of English” was, I soon thought about the idea to write this term paper about Spanish speaking people living in the south of the United States of America. As a student of both languages, it is interesting for me to see how the so- called Hispanics and Americans live together on American territory and in which way both world languages influence each other. Is there also an influence of Spanish on English, or is it just the other way around? I would like to have a closer look on the term “Spanglish”, what it means and as what it could be described in linguistical terms. Is it already an independent language or could it become one? As a starting point it might be interesting to give an overview of the historical and contemporary situation of Hispanics in the USA. Proceeding from that introduction, I will come to the linguistical aspects. First, I will give a few explanation of terms that might be interesting in the case of Spanish speaking people living in the USA. On that foundation I will attempt not just to have a look on the term Spanglish, but with the help of an example also try to define what kind of linguistical phenomenon it might be. Finally, I will try to examine the sociocultural circumstances that can be found in those areas like New Mexico, Texas, California, Colorado or Arizona. A conclusion shall summarize the results of my work and I will try to express my view on the entire situation of Hispanics in the USA.

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Mutual Influence in Situations of Spanish Language Contact in the Americas focuses on the structural results of contact between Spanish and Maya, Quechua, Guaraní, Portuguese, and English in the Americas. This edited volume explores the various ways in which these languages affect the linguistic structure of Spanish in situations of language contact, and also how Spanish impacts their linguistic structure. Across ten chapters, this book offers a broad survey of bidirectional influence in Spanish contact situations both geographically (in the US Southwest, the Yucatán Peninsula, the Andean regions of Ecuador and Peru, and the Southern Cone) and structurally (in the areas of phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, semantics, and pragmatics). By examining the potential structural effects that two languages have on one another, it provides a novel and more holistic perspective on mutual linguistic influence than that of previous work on language contact. The volume serves as a reference on mutual influence in bilingual language varieties and will be of interest to researchers, scholars and graduate students in Hispanic linguistics, and more broadly in language contact.

This volume comprises cutting edge research on language contact and change. The chapters present a wide scope of settings in which Spanish is in contact with other languages, such as Catalan, English, and Quechua; a large breadth of geographical areas (e.g., United States, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina); and varied participant groups, ranging from dialect contacts, second-language learners and heritage speakers to balanced bilinguals and code-switchers. Taken together, the chapters provide rich empirical descriptions of data pertaining to different levels of language, diverse – naturalistic and experimental – methodological approaches to data collection, as well as theoretical implications of the findings. The interdisciplinary perspective adopted by the authors contributes to the linguistic analysis and offers important insights into theoretical linguistics in general, and into theories of sociolinguistics, language variation, bilingualism, and second language acquisition.

This Handbook provides a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of theoretical and descriptive research in contemporary Hispanic sociolinguistics. Offers the first authoritative collection exploring research strands in the emerging and fast-moving field of Spanish sociolinguistics Highlights the contributions that Spanish Sociolinguistics has offered to general linguistic theory Brings together a team of the top researchers in the field to present the very latest perspectives and discussions of key issues Covers a wealth of topics including: variationist approaches, Spanish and its importance in the U.S., language planning, and other topics focused on the social aspects of Spanish Includes several varieties of Spanish, reflecting the rich diversity of dialects spoken in the Americas and Spain

Biculturalism and Spanish in Contact: Sociolinguistic Case Studies provides an original and modern analysis of the field of language change and variation with a specific focus on Spanish as a language in contact. This edited collection, focuses on diachronic variationist approaches to the Spanish language in contact with other languages from a historical sociolinguistics perspective. Topics covered include: language planning and policies, education, biculturalism, linguistic variation issues in the Spanish of the southwestern United States, and other socio-historical and anthropological aspects of the contact situation.

Spanish in New York is a groundbreaking sociolinguistic analysis of immigrant bilingualism in a U.S. setting. Drawing on one of the largest corpora of spoken Spanish ever assembled for a single city, Otheguy and Zentella demonstrate the extent to which the language of Latinos in New York City represents a continuation of structural variation as it is found in Latin America, as well as the extent to which Spanish has evolved in New York City. Their study, which focuses on language contact, dialectal leveling, and structural continuity, carefully distinguishes between the influence of English and the mutual influences of forms of Spanish with roots in different parts of Latin America. Taking variationist sociolinguistics as its guiding paradigm, the book compares the Spanish of New Yorkers born in Latin America with that of those born in New York City. Findings are grounded in a comparative analysis of 140 sociolinguistic interviews of speakers with origins in Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico and Puerto Rico. Quantitative analysis (correlations, anovas, variable hierarchies, constraint hierarchies) reveals the effect on the use of subject personal pronouns of the speaker's gender, immigrant generation, years spent in New York, and amount of exposure to English and to varieties of Spanish. In addition to these speaker factors, structural and communicative variables, including the person and tense of the verb and its referential status, have a significant impact on pronominal usage in New York City.

Spanish in the United States: Attitudes and Variation is a collection of new, cutting-edge research with the purpose of providing scholars interested in Spanish as it is spoken by bilinguals living in the United States a current view of the state of the discipline. This volume is broad and inclusive of the populations studied, methodologies used, and approaches to the linguistic study of Spanish in order to provide scholars with an up-to-date understanding of the complexities of the Spanish(es) spoken in the United States. In addition to this snapshot, this volume stimulates new areas of inquiry and motivates new ways of analyzing the social, linguistic, and educational aspects of what it means to speak Spanish in the United States.