New York Spanish, a New Dialect, Rises

When it comes to language, Hispanic immigrants are doing more than just picking up English as they spend time in New York City: They're also learning new ways of speaking Spanish, a new study that was six years in the making shows.

The study, by a CUNY graduate school linguist, has uncovered a New York City-specific way of speaking Spanish that, in addition to English, has been influenced by dialects from Puerto Rico, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Ecuador.

Researchers made the discovery — a clue that Hispanic immigrants are mingling frequently among one another and with English speakers — by studying one of the tiniest but most telling components of the Spanish language: the pronoun. The little words, necessary in English but optional in most Spanish dialects, were found peppered in New York Spanish much more frequently than in the Spanish of immigrants' native countries.

"The longer you're here, the more pronouns you use," a co-author of the study, Ricardo Otheguy, a linguist at the City University of New York Graduate Center, said. "Even if you don't know English and you're here a long time, the pronouns within you grow."

The study has wider implications beyond its tiny subject, indicating that immigrants are adapting to their new home country and its language, even in a city with a high concentration of Spanish speakers. It comes amid intense election-year debate on immigration, fueled partly by concerns about whether the new wave of Hispanic immigrants is adapting to life in America at the same pace as immigrants in the past.

A sociologist at CUNY who studies immigration, Nancy Foner, said the study's results reaffirmed what sociologists and linguists already know about immigration today and in the past.

"The longer they're here, the more they become involved with life in America," she said. "To say that immigrants become American is pushing it, they don't all speak English — but their language is more and more influenced by English, and that fits into what we know about immigration."

The study also comes at a time of unprecedented diversity among the city's Spanish speakers. With the slow decline of the largest group, Puerto Ricans, other groups are rapidly growing and taking over the neighborhoods Puerto Ricans once dominated. Mexicans have poured into East Harlem, for example, while Colombians, Ecuadorians, and Central Americans have flocked to the other four boroughs.

The different groups often adopt new vocabulary words from their new neighbors, Mr. Otheguy noted, giving the example of Mexicans living among Dominicans in Washington Heights who pick up the word hua-hua to refer to a city bus. The Mexican term is camion.

The different groups also tend to drop different pronouns, with Mexicans and others from mainland Central and South America eliminating the singular pronoun for you, tu, while Puerto Ricans leave out the third-person pronoun for he, she, or it.

Mr. Otheguy said the researchers, who also included Ana Celia Zentella of the University of California and David Livert of Pennsylvania State University, chose to look at pronouns because people use them, or drop them, unconsciously.

They picked 142 people from the six largest Spanish-speaking communities in New York, including Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Cubans, Ecuadorians, and Colombians, making sure to include a sampling of people who had recently arrived and some who have been here longer. The interviewees were then drawn into long conversations with graduate students from their own countries — without knowing what the researchers were looking for. The conversations were then transcribed and laboriously coded for present or missing pronouns.

The discrepancies in their pronouns allowed the researchers, who published their study in December's issue of the journal, Language, to look at whether Spanish speakers have borrowed ways of speaking from their counterparts from other countries.

They found that, indeed, the longer Hispanic immigrants had been in New York, the more they spoke like their Spanish-speaking neighbors from other regions: Mexicans began using tu, while Puerto Ricans started favoring él and ella.

"In the course of one apparent-time generation, the pronoun rate in Spanish New York has grown by a statistically significant eight percentage points," the study said. Spanish-speaking newcomers said their pronouns in 30% of phrases with "eligible verbs," while second-generation Spanish-speaking New Yorkers included pronouns in 38% of phrases.

The study concluded that the changes were creating a "New York Spanish speech community," especially in the second generation — although Mr. Otheguy noted that even first-generation Spanish speakers were being influenced.

"It means there appears to be quite a bit of contact between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. They are speaking with each other, and in many cases forming families," Mr. Otheguy said, adding: "And it shows contact with English is affecting everyone."