Spanish language communities in contact in the United States: A melting pot or a multicultural continuum?

Many different national and regional Spanish language varieties feed and shape the Spanish spoken in the United States. Each one of these varieties has been the result of differing social, cultural and demographic factors. These different Spanish language varieties are also coming into contact with many different American English varieties of speech in the United States. Will the outcome of this be one uniform Spanish variety for all of the United States; or will we face a dialectal continuum with different special interest groups competing to have their language variety prevail over other language varieties that will then be deemed to be less prestigious, less innovative and adaptive, or more fossilized?

In answering these questions, we need to explore the overall impact that other non-Spanish linguistic communities have made to the Spanish spoken in the Americas. It is important to note that the non-Spanish speaking linguistic communities that made contact with the Spanish language communities in America are not limited to the non-Spanish speaking native peoples of the continent. Language communities forcefully introduced from Africa and the Far East and European language communities that voluntarily emigrated also became part of this process.

The globalization process that took place in the Americas during its formative years and to the present, and the different points of language contact that occurred during that process, have led to a wide array of outcomes. At the end of the presentation, participants will be able to:

• Identify and understand specialized linguistic terminology such as: dialects, language varieties, language communities in contact, acrolects, mesolects, basolects, linguistic continuums, and other specialized words;
• Identify and understand some of the results of globalization such as lexical enrichment of vocabularies due to borrowings, calques, substitutions, and neologisms;
• Identify linguistic bias against different language varieties due to lexical variation, and better understand the lexical choices made by speakers of different language varieties in spoken Spanish and English;