A History of English Language

The english language in america
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dialects of the Southwest it is also a geographical variety for which isoglosses can be
traced across the map. Indeed, some of the roots of its geography reach back further than
those of any other variety of American English, to the late sixteenth century and for more
than two centuries afterwards, when Texas was a part of Mexico. Hispanic American
English is unique among the major varieties of English in being the result of languages in
continuing contact within a bilingual culture, and yet the complexity of the linguistic
situation is such that some scholars have questioned whether it is a dialect at all. The
alternative would be to consider the features associated with Hispanic American English
the result of language contact with Spanish and thus the manifestations of English learned
as a second language, rather than the features of a stable dialect. It has been only within
the past three decades that enough research has been done to establish that it is a variety
of American English in its own right. Many of the features of Hispanic American English
do not appear in Spanish, and many of its speakers have low proficiency in Spanish or are
monolingual in English. These facts make clear that the variety is learned and spoken like
any other variety of English. Yet the situation is complex, because the community of
speakers includes those who are fluently bilingual, those who are much more proficient in
Spanish than in English, those who are much more proficient in English than in Spanish,
and others located at various points along the spectrum. While features of pronunciation
and intonation may remain stable, the selection of those features depends on numerous
variables, including the context of speech and the attitude of the speaker. In a study of
Mexican-American English, a variety often referred to as Chicano English, the authors
conclude: “Within the Chicano community, there is a large span of social differences
which are correlated to differences in language acquisition patterns, language usage—
code-choice—and linguistic variables pertaining to Chicano English and other dialects.
When considering Chicano English and patterns of language usage, it is perhaps a
misnomer to refer to ‘the Chicano community’ when there is such wide variation within
the community.” 43 Such variation contributes to the difficulty of estimating the number of
speakers of Chicano English; within the United States a reasonable number would be 25
to 30 million people. Whereas speakers of other varieties of English might modulate the
degree of regionalism or ethnicity by changing the proportions of certain variable
structures of English, speakers of Chicano English who also know Spanish might shift
out of English altogether within a single sentence. This code-switching between English
and Spanish is a familiar feature of Chicano English, as illustrated in the works of
Rolando Hinojosa:
43
Joyce Penfield and Jacob L.Ornstein-Galicia, Chicano English: An Ethnic Contact Dialect
(Amsterdam, 1985), p. 18.