1.5.2. Spanish-influenced English

Hispanic Americans are one of the two largest ethnic groups. They consist of three major groups: ● Puerto Ricans /'pwE:tqu 'rJkqnz/

● Cubans

● Chicanos (or Mexican American)

Approximately 300.000 of roughly 1 mln Cuban Americans live in Dade County in Florida. Another 20% live in West New York and Union City, New Jersey. Because of this areal concentration they have been able to create unified communities with ethnic boundaries, i.e. so called Little Havanas. But integration with the surrounding native Anglo communities is relatively great. Only 6++% of the second generation of Cuban Americans, as is usually the case with the second generation Hispanics, speak English fluently with North American Accent. And only the presence of loan words such as "bad grass" - "gerba mala" may indicate the origin of speaker.

As American citizensPuerto Ricans have long moved freely between their native island and the mainland US. Most originally they went at first to New York city. Many members of their community are bilingual and only 1% of the second generation are monolingual Spanish speakers. Some research showed that those brought up in Puerto Rico speak English marked by interference phenomena.

Chicanos numbered 10.8 mln people in early 1985 and are a rapidly growing group. Chicanos are most numerous in California where they are urban population and in Texas where they are relatively rural. Spanish is more commonly maintained in the Texas environment than in California. Some of them are bilingual, others monolingual English speakers. Among the bilinguals their language is characterized by frequent code-switching which is referred to as Tex-Mex. The linguistic habits of a large portion of the Chicano community are continually reinforced by indirect and direct contact with Spanish. Most important for regarding Chicano English as an ethnic variety of American English is that it is passed onto children and serves as an important function in the speech community and has its own norms. The linguistic features of Chicano English are most prominent in the pronunciation including stress and intonation but there seems to be little syntactic and lexical deviation from English. As the with the Puerto Ricos contact with blacks may result in the use of various features of Black English. Pronunciation shows obvious signs of Spanish influence:

● the shift of stress in compounds (mini'skirt)

● rising pitch contours

● rising pitch in declarative sentences

● devoicing and hardening of final voiced consonants (e.g. please /s/)

● realization of labio-dental fricative /v/ as bilabial /b/

● realization of /T/ - /D/ as /t/ - /d/

● realization central /A/ as low /a/

● simplification of final consonant clusters

● merge of /tS/ - /S/ to /S/: e.g. /tSek/ - /Sek/ (check – sheck)