Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book surveys research on language contact along the 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico. It examines a number of linguistic features of the Spanish variety and the social motivations behind those linguistic changes. The book analyzes the city of Los Angeles as a natural socio-linguistic lab for the formation of new Latino speech communities, dialect contact areas, and dialect mergers. It explores the language behavior and attitudes of 424 Brazilian and Uruguayan high school students from eight border cities. The book focuses on the Afro-Hispanic communities where Spanish may have briefly creolized. It examines the widespread use of the gerund in conversational phrases in the northern Andean Spanish of Ecuador and southern Colombia. The book deals with linguistic variation and change in the Caribbean.