New Dialect Formation Through Language Contact

Abstract

The situation of sustained contact between Spanish and English in Miami during the past half century provides a rare opportunity to study contact-induced language change in an ecological context in which speakers of the immigrant language (i.e., Spanish) have become the numerical majority. The study reported here is designed to track the phonetic and prosodic influences of Spanish on the variety of English emerging among second-generation Miami-born Latinx speakers of various national origin backgrounds by examining a suite of variables shown in prior studies to exhibit Spanish substrate influence in other regional contexts. We examine two kinds of phonetic variables in the English spoken by 20 second-generation Latinx and 5 Anglo white speakers: (1) prosodic rhythm and (2) vowel quality. Prosodic rhythm was quantified using Low and Grabe’s Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI); results show that Miami-born Latinx speakers are significantly more syllable-timed in casual speech than Miami-born Anglo white speakers. Significant vocalic differences were also observed, with Latinx speakers producing lower and more backed tokens of [æ] in prenasal and nonprenasal positions and more backed tokens of [u].