ABSTRACT
This study examines the distribution of the main variants of /r/ among Puerto Ricans in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a city where Puerto Ricans are a minority in the total population and in the Hispanic community. Since opportunities to find Puerto Rican speakers whose social ties put them in more frequent interaction with speakers of other varieties are greater in a city where they constitute a smaller fraction of the Hispanic population, Grand Rapids provides a favorable scenario to study the effects of language and dialect contact on PRS. Hence, while the central part of the investigation is a quantitative analysis of the sociolinguistic variation of /r/ based on age and gender, the study also seeks to determine whether differences associated to the speakers’ maintenance of social ties within their national group provide explanatory insight into the distribution of /r/.
