Spanish in Chicago

Spanish in Chicago is the first book-length study of Spanish in Chicago, where populations originating in both Mexico and Puerto Rico have lived in contact for generations and Latinos now comprise nearly a third of the population.

Identifying Chicago as a rich site for examining language and dialect contact at both community and family levels, Kim Potowski and Lourdes Torres describe the spoken Spanish of Chicago, analyzing patterns of language change and identity constructions and establishing their likely causes. Drawing on interviews with 124 individuals across three generations of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and MexiRican Chicagoans, Potowski and Torres trace the effects of language and dialect contact through close sociolinguistic analysis of lexicon, discourse markers, codeswitching, the subjunctive, and phonology.

Their analysis uniquely examines these features across three generations of speakers and two different regional origins within the same corpus.

By including MexiRicans as a category, the book not only assesses the dynamics of linguistic convergence, dialect leveling, accommodation, and language loss, but also the concept of intrafamiliar dialect contact pioneered by Potowski.

Contextualizing these language changes within the history of Latino communities in Chicago, Spanish in Chicago provides a nuanced picture of a minority language in a major US city and a vital contribution to sociolinguistics and Latino studies.