Spanish in Chicago

"Spanish in Chicago is the first book-length study of Spanish in Chicago, a site where Spanish is a minority language in contact with dominant English. The book's goal is to describe the oral Spanish of Chicago based Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and MexiRicans across three generations and identify patterns of change and propose explanations for them. It describes what happens when speakers who use different varieties of Spanish come into contact with each other in Chicago. The study contributes to discussions of possible language or dialect contact outcomes such as linguistic convergence, dialect leveling, accommodation, and language loss. The book starts with an introduction to the history of the Puerto Rican and Mexican communities in Chicago, including histories of settlement, shifting demographics, contact and engagement, and mutual social and linguistic attitudes. It features an analysis of five linguistic features: lexical familiarity, proportional use of "so" vs "entonces", number of codeswitches and percent English use, production of subjunctive morphology in obligatory and variable contexts, and two phonological features, the weakening of coda /s/ and the velarization of /r/. The analyses consider the role of proficiency and generation in the production of all five of these features. The book then offers an extensive discussion of the factors that underlie the development of diverse Spanish proficiency levels within Latino Chicago and offers suggestions on how to promote Spanish language vitality across generations in the future. The book's findings are compared to other foundational studies of Spanish in the US"--
Spanish in Chicago is the first book-length study of Spanish in Chicago, where populations originating in both Mexico and Puerto Rico have lived in contact for generations and Latinos now comprise nearly a third of the population. Identifying Chicago as a rich site for examining language and dialect contact at both community and family levels, Kim Potowski and Lourdes Torres describe the spoken Spanish of Chicago, analyzing patterns of language change and identity constructions and establishing their likely causes.Drawing on interviews with 124 individuals across three generations of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and MexiRican Chicagoans, Potowski and Torres trace the effects of language and dialect contact through close sociolinguistic analysis of lexicon, discourse markers, codeswitching, the subjunctive, and phonology. Their analysis uniquely examines these features across three generations of speakers and two different regional origins within the same corpus. By including MexiRicans as a category, the book not only assesses the dynamics of linguistic convergence, dialect leveling, accommodation, and language loss, but also the concept of intrafamiliar dialect contact pioneered by Potowski. Contextualizing these language changes within the history of Latino communities in Chicago, Spanish in Chicago provides a nuanced picture of a minority language in a major US city and a vital contribution to sociolinguistics and Latino studies.