Lexical Leveling in Four New York City Spanish Dialects: Linguistic and Social Factors

Five useful collections of articles on the varieties of Spanish spoken in the U.S. (Elias-Olivares, ed. 1978, Amastae and Elias-Olivares, eds. 1981, Duran, ed. 1981, Fishman and Keller, eds. 1982, Elias-Olivares, Leone, Cisneros, and Gutierrez, eds. 1985) have appeared since the publication of the landmark annotated bibliography by Teschner, Bills, and Craddock (1975), but there are still many lacunae in our knowledge of the linguistic diversity in U.S. Latino populations. Only five articles in these volumes report on varieties other than Chicano or Puerto Rican Spanish. The need for linguistic research on other dialects becomes more urgent as the Latino population climbs toward the 25 million mark by the 1990 census, with increasing migrations from diverse Spanish-speaking nations. In New York City there are approximately two million Latinos from all parts of the Spanishspeaking world; they constitute 20% of the city's total population. The presence of diverse groups of speakers of one language offers an invaluable opportunity to study the linguistic and socio-cultural effects of extensive contact among diverse dialects. This study analyzes inter-dialectal contact at the lexical level among the four largest Hispanic groups in New York CityPuerto Ricans, Dominicans, Colombians, and Cubans. Specifically, we sought to investigate whether each group maintained its country's regional lexicon, assimilated that of the largest Spanish