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Emerging Hispanic English: New Dialect Formation In The American South, Walt Wolfram, Phillip M. Carter, Rebecca Moriello

Phillip M. Carter

Although stable Hispanic populations have existed in some regions of the United States for centuries, other regions, including the mid-Atlantic South, are just experiencing the emergence of permanent Hispanic communities. This situation o¡ers an ideal opportunity to examine the dynamics of new dialect formation in progress, and the extent to which speakers acquire local dialect traits as they learn English as a second language.We focus on the pro- duction of the /ai/ diphthong among adolescents in two emerging Hispanic communities, one in an urban and one in a rural context. Though both English and Spanish have the diphthong /ai/, the …