Spanish Dialectal Contact in the United States

Spanish speakers of varying regional and national origin routinely interact linguistically in the United States. Spanish dialectal contact results from this interaction. This chapter identifies several challenges that scholars face when studying dialectal contact, and details a selection of studies that demonstrate how this topic can be carefully and effectively examined. It articulates generalizations about Spanish dialectal contact within the framework of contemporary sociolinguistic theory. Studying dialectal contact in the United States is a task fraught with challenges, which substantially impede the development of a generalized understanding of the linguistic interaction between different groups of Spanish speakers in the United States. Three principal challenges are discussed: the Hispanophone world cannot be coherently linguistically zoned; the concept of dialects suppresses the linguistic agency of individual speakers; and the outcomes of language contact and dialectal contact are difficult to separate in a U. S. setting.