Varieties of Spanish in the United States:

8. Central American Spanish in the United States

142 8 Central American Spanish in the United States Introduction Beginning in the 1980s immigration from Central America to the United States reached considerable proportions, and as of the 2000 census Central American communities in the United States represent some 5% of the total Latino population , outnumbering both Cubans and Dominicans. A combination of economic reasons and political pressures—the latter particularly acute during the Central American civil wars of the 1980s—has stimulated the northward migration of economically stable family units. Because there is no common border between Central America and the United States, and because many families arrive by air or by sea, there is a greater tendency to settle in geographically delimited population clusters, which then form centripetal nuclei attracting further immigration. It is common for Central American immigrants, like their fellow Latin Americans, to settle in cities with large Spanish-speaking populations; this follows both from the geographical location of such cities, which usually represent the southern border of the United States and/or major airline termini, and from the desire to live in a minimally foreign environment . Although the Central Americans who move to already-established colonies at first interact principally with their compatriots, it is not long before the inevitable contact with other Hispanic Americans and American-born Latinos takes place, leading to transculturation and the expansion of social horizons of all groups involved. CENTRAL AMERICAN SPANISH IN THE UNITED STATES 143 Regional and Social Variation in Central American Spanish Central America is a region of great disparities in levels of personal wealth and education, both in urban and rural regions. This has noticeable effects on language variation, with considerable vertical stratification of sociolinguistic variables in all Central American countries. The main Central American migrations to the United States have involved people from rural regions with relatively low levels of formal education; as a consequence, linguistic traits common to rustic speech but shunned in formal academic settings are often prominent in Central American speech communities in the United States. As a dialect zone Central America is the least well documented of all the major Latin American regions, and most of the core bibliography dates back half a century or more. Until the 1980s almost no linguistic studies of Central American Spanish were based on fieldwork (Canfield 1953, 1960 for El Salvador is a noteworthy exception), and the region remains underrepresented in linguistic studies to this day. In broad terms Central American Spanish can be divided into three major dialects: Guatemala, Costa Rica, and the triad of El Salvador–Honduras–Nicaragua. The main features that distinguish these dialects involve the pronunciation of key consonants, particularly final /s/ and the trill /r/; vocabulary items tend to be more evenly distributed across these five countries, and all Central American nations share the use of the subject pronoun vos, described in the following section. The two flanking countries of the former Capitanía General de Guatemala, later the ill-fated Central American union, share a strong pronunciation of word-final /s/ that bears a great similarity with most of Mexico and the Andean zone. The three central countries aspirate word-final /s/ as [h] to a greater or lesser extent and, in general, have weaker consonantal articulations. Both Guatemala and Costa Rica exhibit some preference for a fricative /r/ (somewhat like the s in English measure) and the pronunciation of the group /tr/ as an affricate, approaching English ch. There are many regional differences among the Central American dialects, which share the following phonetic traits: • Weak pronunciation of the posterior fricative /x/ (the jota) to a simple aspiration [h]. In words like trabajo (work) the /x/ is barely audible. • Weak pronunciation of /j/ in contact with /i/ and /e/; the /j/ often disappears in words such as gallina (hen), silla (chair), sello (stamp). • Word-final /n/ is velarized, as in English sing. Central American Morphology: The Voseo The five Spanish-speaking Central American republics exhibit a great amount of linguistic diversity among themselves, and yet there exist certain common characteristics that may be used to define the entire group as opposed to the Mexican area to the north and the Panamanian/Caribbean region to the east and south. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of Central American Spanish is the all-pervasive use of the second person familiar pronoun vos instead of tú, which appears in Mexico, the Caribbean, Spain, and much of South...