ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the social processes that accompany lexical borrowing and seeks evidence for city-wide norms in the selection of borrowing vocabulary among Spanish speakers in New York. Results of distributional analysis of novel borrowings (operationalized as ‘nonce’ items) and shared lexicon (operationalized as ‘used by 5+ informants) suggest that the middle class are responsible for introducing novel lexicon to the community and that the working class, those with less English confidence or skills, and obviously but importantly, those that use Spanish regularly are primarily responsible for their dissemination. Finally, results suggest that underlying manifest differences in borrowing on one level (i.e. frequency), there exist community-wide patterns that unite Spanish speakers in the city across immigrant generation. In particular, results show that novel lexicon and shared lexicon are equally integral to the way that borrowing is done in NYC.
