Spanish In Chicago

"Spanish in Chicago is the first book-length study of Spanish in Chicago, a site where Spanish is a minority language in contact with dominant English. The book's goal is to describe the oral Spanish of Chicago based Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and MexiRicans across three generations and identify patterns of change and propose explanations for them. It describes what happens when speakers who use different varieties of Spanish come into contact with each other in Chicago. The study contributes to discussions of possible language or dialect contact outcomes such as linguistic convergence, dialect leveling, accommodation, and language loss. The book starts with an introduction to the history of the Puerto Rican and Mexican communities in Chicago, including histories of settlement, shifting demographics, contact and engagement, and mutual social and linguistic attitudes. It features an analysis of five linguistic features: lexical familiarity, proportional use of "so" vs "entonces", number of codeswitches and percent English use, production of subjunctive morphology in obligatory and variable contexts, and two phonological features, the weakening of coda /s/ and the velarization of /r/. The analyses consider the role of proficiency and generation in the production of all five of these features. The book then offers an extensive discussion of the factors that underlie the development of diverse Spanish proficiency levels within Latino Chicago and offers suggestions on how to promote Spanish language vitality across generations in the future. The book's findings are compared to other foundational studies of Spanish in the US"--

A Spanish-English, English-Spanish dictionary that contains thousands of terms including slang and provides guides to pronunciation, grammar, suffixes, and regular, irregular, and orthographic changing verbs. Covers International Spanish and American English.

“As in the first edition, Pharies debunks—in an engaging manner—a number of ‘linguistic myths’ about Spanish orthography, pronunciation, and grammar.” —Choice Since its publication in 2007, A Brief History of the Spanish Language has become the leading introduction to the history of one of the world’s most widely spoken languages. Moving from the language’s Latin roots to its present-day forms, this concise book offers readers insights into the origin and evolution of Spanish, the historical and cultural changes that shaped it, and its spread around the world. A Brief History of the Spanish Language focuses on the most important aspects of the development of the Spanish language, eschewing technical jargon in favor of straightforward explanations. Along the way, it answers many of the common questions that puzzle native speakers and non-native speakers alike, such as: Why do some regions use tú while others use vos? How did the th sound develop in Castilian? And why is it la mesa but el agua? David A. Pharies, a world-renowned expert on the history and development of Spanish, has updated this edition with new research on all aspects of the evolution of Spanish and current demographic information. This book is perfect for anyone with a basic understanding of Spanish and a desire to further explore its roots. It also provides an ideal foundation for further study in any area of historical Spanish linguistics and early Spanish literature. A Brief History of the Spanish Language is a grand journey of discovery, revealing in a beautifully compact format the fascinating story of the language in both Spain and Spanish America.

This book represents the culmination of a lifetime of research in the spoken Spanish dialects of the Americas by one of the foremost experts in this field. Based on more than sixty years of residence, travel, research, and teaching among Spanish-speaking people, Canfield's study of the phonological phenomena that have created dialects of Spanish in the Americas makes use of historical treatises, contemporary accounts, and the author's own observations. Bibliographies for each area and a main bibliography of some three hundred pertinent books and articles make this book valuable both as a text and as a reference work.

Police, the press, and the public all see the kind of violence that besets the inner city today as irrational and basically about turf, revenge, or drugs. Renowned criminologist and expert on gangs, John Hagedorn here tells a very different and little-known story centered on the dramatic rise and fall of a Mafia-like Latino organization in Chicago called Spanish Growth & Development.” Hagedorn's main informant is Sal Martino,' an Italian Mafioso who became intimately involved with the In$ane Family,” one of the factions of Spanish Growth & Development. Through Sal's first-hand account, Hagedorn shows that the violence was not a result of disorganized crime” but rather the outcome of SGD's prolonged demise. He gives us for the first time a detailed the history of SGDthe reasons for its creation, the uneasy alliances between gang families, the organization's reliance on bottom-up police corruption, and its ultimate collapse in a pool of blood at a 1999 peace” conference. Revealing the hidden and riveting stories of Chicago gangs' efforts to build structures ostensibly to reduce violence and to organize crime, of the integration of gang and mafia history, and of the central role of police corruption in Chicago's gangland,The In$ane Chicago Way makes a powerful argument for the need to regard corruption as the bedrock of gang power. It dispels the notion that gang violence can be explained solely by ecological, neighborhood-based processes and sheds light on the current gang situation in Chicago by laying bare its history while raising disturbing questions for researchers, policy-makers, and the public.