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  • Spanish in New York: Language Contact, Dialectal Leveling, and Structural Continuity by Ricardo Otheguy and Ana Celia Zentella
  • Marta Fairclough
Otheguy, Ricardo, and Ana Celia Zentella. Spanish in New York: Language Contact, Dialectal Leveling, and Structural Continuity. New York: Oxford UP, 2012. Pp. 299. ISBN 978-0-19-973740-6.

In Spanish in New York: Language Contact, Dialectal Leveling, and Structural Continuity, Ricardo Otheguy and Ana Celia Zentella present an in-depth analysis of pronominal variation in Spanish (i.e., presence vs. absence of subject personal pronouns in optional contexts) based on a large stratified sample of naturalistic speech data representative of the six largest groups of bilingual Spanish speakers in New York City (NYC): Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, and Cuba. The study takes a sociolinguistic perspective of linguistic variation in the Labovian tradition in which linguistic variables are correlated to social variables. In addition to describing the covariation, the authors support their findings with inferential statistics and add post hoc, functionalist explanations for the patterns they find in the data. They offer some theoretically based predictions regarding stability or change in response to linguistic contact with English or dialectal leveling (i.e., different varieties of [End Page 596] the same language influencing one another by either leveling their linguistic differences or strengthening them to maintain distance).

The book contains ten chapters, brief concluding remarks, and two appendixes. Chapter 1 begins with a sociodemographic overview of Spanish in NYC: its history; speakers; media; and language use, maintenance, and loss. It then presents the linguistic variable, defines key constructs in the study, and justifies using a variationist framework based on performance grammar.

Chapters 2 and 3 outline the study methodology. Chapter 2 details how the sample was created: 140 interviews were selected from more than 300 conducted over five years. Each participant completed a roughly one-hour interview, which was transcribed following detailed guidelines. Participants were proportionally balanced across the six largest groups of NYC Hispanics, hailing from two major regions: the Caribbean and the Latin American mainland. Thirty-five social features are analyzed in the study (including gender, national and regional origin, years in NYC, social class, years of education, English skills, and amount of Spanish use). Each feature is clearly defined and quantified to show its distribution. Chapter 3 focuses on how the linguistic variable (i.e., presence vs. absence of over 60,000 tokens of subject personal pronouns in variable contexts) was codified and analyzed using ten linguistic variables. The chapter clearly explains the rationale for exclusion or admission criteria based on linguistic context; each criterion is illustrated with examples to further clarify which pronouns were included in the corpus.

The subsequent chapters present the study results. Chapter 4 analyzes rate of pronoun use according to sociodemographic factors. Overall, most analyzed factors, including country of origin, do not correlate with pronoun use. However, rate of pronoun use does delineate two clearly distinguishable groups of Spanish speakers: Caribbeans and Mainlanders. Further analyses indicate that the former group appears to be homogeneous whereas the latter shows considerable variation. In terms of the influence of language contact (chapter 5), several factors come into play: generation, age of arrival and years in NYC, and English proficiency are all associated with the rate of appearance of Spanish pronouns. The authors conclude that more contact with English results in a higher rate of pronoun use. The data also indicate the presence of accommodation and dialectal leveling or convergence with regard to personal pronoun use. Specifically, participants who associated more with speakers of their own dialect group tended to maintain their variety, whereas those who associated more with Latinos from other origins were likely to converge. Whereas the influence of English on Spanish appears to increase with generation and exposure to the majority language, language leveling seems more affected by interaction with speakers of the same or different dialects. Multiple regression analyses presented in chapter 7 identify the sociodemographic features most relevant in explaining rate of pronoun use. The strongest correlations with rate are region (Caribbean/Mainlander), exposure (newcomer/established immigrant), and command of English (excellent/less than excellent), followed by dialect (contact lect/reference lect), generation (New York...

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