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Article published In: Spanish in Context
Vol. 21:3 (2024) ► pp.563–597

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A minority within a minority

Dialectal accommodation by Speakers of Central American varieties of Spanish in Nebraska

ORCiD logo with link | University of Nebraska-Lincoln
 | Howard University
Published online: 28 January 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.21018.vel
Abstract
We explore self-reported use of the second-person singular pronoun vos by a group of speakers of Central American Spanish in the state of Nebraska. A specific case of interdialectal contact that takes place in five non-metropolitan communities in the Midwest is described. All speakers included in this study lived or had grown up in communities with low ethnolinguistic vitality for Spanish and intense contact with speakers of Mexican American and Mexican Spanish. Our analysis focuses on the pronoun vos because it is a feature absent from the dialects of Spanish spoken by the majority of Latinx Nebraskans, and because its use and intergenerational transmission are closely inosculated with social meaning. Respondents’ articulation of their sociolinguistic experience describes a situation that includes complex processes of language brokering, acquisition, loss, inter- and intra-dialectal contact, and intra- generational language planning. Three forces that foster the use of vos by speakers of Central American varieties of Spanish in Nebraska, and three factors that hinder it are identified.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Ethnolinguistic vitality, linguistic accommodation and dialectal contact
    • 1.2Previous studies on Central American varieties in the US
    • 1.3Description of the communities included in this study
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Analysis by topic
  • 4.Discussion
    • Do they use the pronoun vos?
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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