Introduction

This chapter focuses on the study of language variation and change in southeastern United States varieties of Hispanic English (HE): in short, the language of speakers like Marcos. "Marcos" is a 13-year-old middle school student living in the medium-sized southern city of Durham, North Carolina (NC). The language of speakers like Marcos is representative of the multifaceted and sometimes self-contradictory set of questions surrounding language shift and identity in the mid-Atlantic South at the turn of the 21st century. The chapter examines patterns of English Language Learner variation in the speech of a group of HE speakers, in one elementary school and two middle schools, all in Durham, NC. It also examines the sociolinguistic variable of past tense unmarking—the occurrence of verb forms that are formally unmarked in past tense contexts where standard varieties of English use simple past forms. The task of a variationist sociolinguistic study is to describe and explain the systematic variation of language structures.