Understanding how contact with English impacts language variation remains a central question in sociolinguistic research on US Spanish. This study investigates the possible impact of English on the Spanish Spoken in Arizona, near the US-Mexico border, where long-term contact has existed due to historical and contemporary factors. The contact issue is explored through the output of three variables: the extension of estar in contexts where normatively the copula ser is expected, first person subject pronoun expression (SPE), and mood choice. These variables are valid tools for the diagnosis of contact-induced changes. For each variable, it is typically considered that structures are simplified due to contact with English (i.e. Silva-Corvalán, 1994). However, recent variationist studies have demonstrated a lack of evidence for effects due to language contact (i.e. (LaCasse, 2018; Poplack et al., 2018; Torres Cacoullos et al., 2017).
The present study utilizes data collected from 16 sociolinguistic interviews with Spanish-English bilingual speakers in Arizona, whose families migrated from Sonora, Mexico, and compares them to 16 interviews with monolingual Spanish speakers in Sonora. The comparison of these two corpora (one monolingual and one bilingual, collected in adjacent areas, and analyzed following identical procedures) allows for a systematic, precise measure of possible influences English has on Sonoran Spanish by discarding the influence of dialectal differences.
Comparisons of the output of the three variables in these two communities show an overwhelming lack of differences between the Spanish of the monolinguals and the bilinguals. For the extension of estar, the overall frequency (16.2% in Sonora and 20.8% in Arizona) and the rankings of the factors that condition the variable are similar in both groups. Similarly, for SPE there is not a significant increase in the overall frequency rates between groups (16.7% in Sonora and 19.3% in Ariozna) and the rankings of the factors that condition the variable are similar in both groups. Place of origin of the participant (Sonora/Arizona) is not a significant factor for any of the three variables.
The lack of evidence of English effects on the Spanish of these bilinguals may be the result of the strict sample taken in this study that provides what Poplack and Levey (2010) refer to as an “appropriate reference”, a monolingual reference point that is related to the bilingual dialect being studied.