ABSTRACT
The data presented in this chapter are from my fieldwork with Latinos and Latinas in Los Angeles, California, in the mid-1990s (Fought 2003). My original plan was to study only Spanish in the community, but once I arrived and started talking to people, I realized that the variation and changes going on in the English dialects of the community were very interesting as well. Bilingual Latino communities in the U.S. are what linguists refer to as language contact areas. Like other bilingual or multilingual areas of the world, they provide a chance to study unique and interesting language patterns, because when two languages coexist in one community for a long time, they often come to influence each other. (See also the chapter “Language Contact.”) Many people (not linguists) think this is bad somehow, that two languages influencing each other will lead to the deterioration of both languages. But change and deterioration are not the same thing. One of the first things that new students of linguistics learn is that all living languages change and that this process is both natural and inevitable. Language change is also one of the phenomena that linguists are most interested in.
