Spanish in the U.S.

Educational institutions developed in Tucson, Arizona in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, during a critical time in cultural and political shifts of power between Anglo and Mexican elites in Southwestern United States. My qualitative analysis reconstructs language policies in the incipient educational system in Territorial Tucson. This article examines official and unofficial language policies in both public and private schools in Tucson that reflected this accommodation of power and the negotiation of a new racial hierarchy in the context of westward expansion. I argue that the private schools Mexican elites founded in this period maintained bilingual instruction and promoted biliteracy as a means of racially and linguistically distancing themselves from Anglos, Indians and Mexicans from lower socioeconomic classes in public schools.

This book introduces readers to basic concepts of sociolinguistics with a focus on Spanish in the US. The coverage goes beyond linguistics to examine the history and politics of Spanish in the US, the relationship of language to Latinx identities, and how language ideologies and policies reflect and shape societal views of Spanish and its speakers. Accessible to those with no linguistic background, this book provides students with a foundation in the study of language and society, and the opportunity to relate theoretical concepts to Spanish in the US in a range of contexts, including everyday speech, contemporary culture, media, education and policy. The book is a substantially revised and expanded 2nd edition of Spanish Speakers in the USA, including new chapters on the history of Spanish in the US, the demographics of Spanish in the US, and language policy; and expanded chapters on language ideologies, race, identity, media, and education.

A Spanish-language edition is also available: https://www.multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/?K=9781800413931

Reviews
“Adopting a thoroughly interdisciplinary, critical and social constructionist approach, Fuller and Leeman make tremendous strides in teasing out the myriad ethnoracial, geopolitical and sociocultural foundations that affect Spanish speakers in being counted, educated and cared for in US society. This book will undoubtedly become a cornerstone in the formation of the next generation of scholars and activists dedicated to the study of Spanish in the US.”
Glenn A. Martinez, The Ohio State University, USA

“Speaking Spanish in the US is an insightful, accessible, and wide-ranging book that provides a critical counterforce to contemporary discourse that criminalizes Latinx Spanish-speakers and their linguistic practices, showing definitively that Latinx people are now and have always been a vital part of US sociocultural and political economic life”
Hilary Parsons Dick, Arcadia University, USA

"A significant contribution to the study of language in society, this book challenges readers to consider the social and political meanings of speaking Spanish in the United States [...] The inclusion of key terminology, discussion questions, and resources for further reading make this book an ideal text for courses in linguistics, language studies, and a number of other disciplines."
Language in Society 50 (2021)

"Educators, scholars, and students of linguistics, Hispanic linguistics, and Latino studies, as well as academics in other fields and nonacademics interested in the state of Spanish in the US would benefit tremendously from reading this text, as it intertwines many threads quite masterfully and clearly develops how to use an interdisciplinary critical sociopolitical approach to integrate language, identity, and linguistic ideology into teaching and social justice."
Latino Studies, 2021

"Speaking Spanish in the US es, desde ya, un hito en los estudios sobre la lengua española en los Estados Unidos. Marca el camino, o los caminos, a seguir."
Hispania, Volume 104, Number 3, September 2021

"Este libro es una publicación sumamente interesante para aprender y reflexionar acerca del contexto social, político e ideológico del español en los Estados Unidos en la actualidad y también acerca de las condiciones históricas y otros antecedentes que han moldeado esa situación [...] [E]s altamente recomendable para estudiantes o para investigadores que precisen de referencias sobre temas particulares concernientes al español. 
Infoling 6.24 (2021)

En definitiva, Speaking Spanish in the US muestra las realidades sociolingüísticas del español en EEUU, visibilizando la diversidad de la comunidad latinx y su relevancia en la historia, sociedad y desarrollo económico de este país. Es un libro accesible para estudiantes e investigadores que no tienen formación especializada en los estudios sobre lenguaje en su contexto sociocultural; sin embargo, también constituye un estudio de largo alcance que indaga perspicazmente las causas etno- racionales, geopolíticas, ideológicas y sociales que subyacen en el discurso que degrada a los hispanohablantes y a sus prácticas lingüísticas.
Discurso & Sociedad, Vol.15(4), 2021

I will plan to use this textbook for my general education-level students, and I would recommend it to instructors teaching courses on the sociopolitics of Spanish in the US; it takes on an ambitious array of potentially sprawling topics in an interesting, focused, and accessible way. This work lives up to its promise, providing a valuable, complex approach to a compelling topic that is of critical importance to higher education in today's political landscape.
Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 2021

The book is clearly organized and would make an engaging text for a course on Spanish in the U.S. or courses that study the intersection of politics and language. Students of many interrelated disciplines could benefit from this book, as well as Spanish instructors who are ready to implement critical pedagogy in their courses and would like inspiration for where to start.
Spanish as a Heritage Language Vol. 1 No. 1, 2021

This volume is an important addition to the growing body of linguistic research on the oldest European language spoken in what is now the United States. Its focus on the social and political realities of Spanish speakers, as opposed to structural aspects of the language itself, sets it somewhat apart from other studies. While some book-length treatises do mention the sociopolitical dimensions in which Spanish exists, none deals with these as a principal theme.
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2021

In general terms it is safe to say that lexical need does play a role in the borrowing process since new realities are more easily expressed using new vocabulary.  Insufficient differentiation also appears to play a role in determining
which words to borrow.  speakers borrow from many different semantic categories regardless of the existence of native language synonyms. The LEON s in this study come from a wide variety of semantic categories including categories in which lexical need plays no role.

There are a considerable number of studies that analyze the benefits of language(s) in the labor market. It is a sensitive topic because of its relevance for language maintenance, and therefore, for the selective acculturation of immigrants in host societies. In this paper, the effect of non-English language fluency on the occupational attainment of immigrants and natives is analyzed, both in terms of occupational wages and socio-economic status. Results indicate that there is no advantage associated with non-English language fluency, either for natives or immigrants. Rather, a penalty for the specific case of Spanish fluency among immigrants was found. Three explanations from previous literature regarding the benefits of bilingualism in the labor market – human capital, devaluation and discrimination— are discussed in relation to the obtained results. The paper concludes with some recommendations about the recognition of language diversity in the labor market and policies aimed at the integrative acculturation of immigrants.

This paper examines the evolution of the Spanish language as a public language in the Spanish newspapers published in New Mexico between 1850 and 1950. Spanish spoken in New Mexico has been characterized as old, archaic, and as an isolated Spanish dialect. However, this article shows that the archaic flavor of the New Mexican Spanish language might be attributed to an unconscious construction of social identity developed by the Hispanic population in the area as a result of a deep and extensive language contact situation that has profoundly impacted people's lives throughout the years since the region was annexed to the United States. This paper analyzes almost 900 articles from a variety of textual genres such as news, editorials, essays, advertisements, and letters to the editor in order to evaluate the use of Spanish as a public language and its relationship with English in the context of social and political changes that have occurred in the area.

The goal of this study is to shed light on one broad issue, which is how different Spanish-speaking groups in the United States (native Mexican Spanish speakers, heritage speakers, and language learners) are perceived by native listeners, and one narrow issue, which is how the presence of [v], commonly associated with Spanish in the United States, affects their evaluations. To this end, 75 Mexican Spanish listeners participated in a matched-guise test in which 12 speakers (four from each of the aforementioned groups) gave directions. One baseline clause was used for each speaker with cases of <v> spliced once to contain [v] and once to contain the standard [b] or [β], and listeners evaluated each voice along a matrix of social properties. A statistical analysis of 1,800 evaluations finds that the interpretation of [v] hinges upon speaker group, with the most extreme fluctuations in evaluations for the native speakers. Speaker gender also conditions evaluations: [v] significantly decreases evaluations of intelligence and Spanish goodness for all male speakers but increases evaluations of intelligence and confidence for native female speakers. I contend that [v] is perceived as a hyperarticulation strategy that indexes precision, literacy, and education, enhancing positive perceptions of femininity, but the variant is evaluated negatively where hyperarticulated speech is not considered the gendered norm, i.e. in men’s speech. Finally, this study finds that heritage speakers are evaluated more harshly than both native speakers and language learners, suggesting that linguistic discrimination against heritage speakers occurs almost immediately among native Spanish listeners.

This dissertation examines language contact between Spanish and English in the Southeastern U.S. by analyzing Spanish spoken in Georgia. Through an analysis of immigrant Spanish in the city of Roswell, an exurb of Atlanta, potential contact-induced language change is investigated through the lens of subject expression. While most research on Spanish has been carried out in regions such as the Southwest and Northeast, the Southeastern U.S. has not received as much scholarly attention. Therefore, the present investigation seeks to examine understudied varieties of U.S. Spanish, specifically regarding the linguistic processes at work in recent language contact situations. Latin American immigration to the Southeast has led to recent demographic shift in this region and substantial Spanish-speaking populations are emerging that historically were not part of the Southeast. The city of Roswell in particular represents this demographic shift in the Southeast, making it an ideal test site for emerging bilingual speech communities.

The current study examines subject expression among 20 Mexican immigrants using sociolinguistic interview data. The speakers' average length of residency (LOR) in the U.S. is 12 years, and their average age of arrival (AOA) is 27. Tokens of subject pronouns from the interviews were coded for language-internal (linguistic) variables previously shown to constrain subject expression (e.g. person/number, switch reference, tense-mood-aspect [TMA]), morphological ambiguity, polarity, specificity) as well as language-external (social) variables (e.g. English proficiency, age, gender, LOR, AOA), and then analyzed using mixed-effects multivariate analysis in Rbrul (Johnson 2009). Results indicate an overall overt pronoun rate of 27% for Mexicans in Roswell, which is higher than what has been reported for monolingual Mexican Spanish. The multivariate analysis showed that several linguistic variables (e.g. person/number, switch reference, morphological ambiguity, polarity) and one social variable (age) played a significant role in pronoun variation. Moreover, differential effects were revealed when compared to monolingual Mexican Spanish for variables such as TMA and verb class, suggesting an influence of bilingualism. Such divergent linguistic configurations in Roswell Spanish suggest that we are seeing an emergent variety of Mexican Spanish in the U.S. with regard to subject pronoun expression.

The origin of New World Spanish (NWS) is often identified as an original leveled dialect that arose during the earliest moments of Spanish arrival and then spread throughout the Americas. One common denominator in the available accounts of dialect contact and koinéization in NWS is the fact that such studies usually attempt to encompass its evolution as a single process. Perhaps as a consequence of such analytical approaches, little or no reference is commonly made to the possibility that some areas may have followed highly idiosyncratic sociohistorical paths, causing explanatory difficulties for the single leveled dialect approach. In this article we offer an analysis of the genesis of Traditional New Mexican Spanish that suggests the possibility of a variety of NWS that arose independently of others.

This case study examined how one instructor navigated between two competing
discourses in an intermediate Spanish heritage language (HL) classroom: on the one
hand, teaching ‘Standard Spanish’ to help students achieve professional success, and
legitimizing home linguistic practices on the other. In addition to expressing both
perspectives directly through overt language, the instructor also represented them
through indirect representation of stances toward the context, toward ways of using
language, and toward other speakers. She did this by moving in and out of her
language teacher role and thus constructing different social contexts in the classroom,
by displaying positive and negative affective stances toward features of local varieties
of Spanish, and by constructing stances of authority based on knowledge of ‘correct’
Spanish in some moments, and based on her own experiences as a bilingual in others.
The study findings contribute to an understanding of the role of US educational
institutions in the construction of ideologies about Spanish and provide information
that can be used to improve HL instruction.

Latin@s in the U.S. are exposed to a range of societal discourses about the value of the Spanish language and the identities associated with different kinds of multilingual language practices. On the one hand, English Only discourses represent Spanish as inferior to English, and on the other hand a discourse that values an imagined monolingual ‘Standard’ variety of Spanish delegitimizes the dialectical variation and language mixing practices of U.S. Spanish-speakers. At the same time, Spanish has been discursively linked to Latin@ identity in pedagogical and activist writings, Census documents and national public discourse. While this association between language and ethnic identity may lend value to Spanish, it can also lead to an assumption that Spanish has a uniform social meaning for all Latin@s. Current research on multilingual practices provides evidence that the connection between language and identity is much more complex than a simple one-to-one relationship. Instead, people use language to represent identities in interaction within specific social contexts. Latin@s in the U.S. are often participants in multiple communities with different language practices and diverse beliefs about the relationship between language and identity. With the spread of globalization as well as the recognition of bilingual practices in classroom contexts, community and institutional practices are increasingly intertwined, leading to new opportunities to negotiate the social meaning of language. It is proposed that the relationship between language and the identity of U.S. Latin@s can best be understood using a framework that accounts for the histories of particular language users.

El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar la ideología sobre el lenguaje de la mujer, según se refleja en los tratados de los moralistas españoles de la Edad Moderna. Comenzamos prestando atención a las actitudes y creencias sobre el silencio y la palabra heredadas de la tradición bíblica, para repasar a continuación los estereotipos del habla femenina y su censura y estigmatización en las obras de los tratadistas. Cuando otras formas más directas de poder y control sobre la propia vida no están a su alcance, la mujer encuentra en el lenguaje una herramienta esencial para progresar o proteger sus propios intereses. La participación de la mujer en la vida de la comunidad, con sus comentarios, críticas, acusaciones y murmuraciones, constituye una actuación lingüística con posibilidad de erosionar las estructuras patriarcales de la sociedad y da lugar al gran recelo y la inquietud que estas obras ponen de manifiesto.

Immigrant workers seeking employment through informal day labor networks must continually reinvent themselves in rapid-fire job interviews with potential employers. In these gatekeeping encounters, employers and workers use various techniques to construct rapport and co-membership. Drawing on ethnographic research with Latino workers, employers, and their intermediaries (language brokers) in Tucson, Arizona, my findings suggest that it is possible for employers to manipulate rapport and co-membership to demonstrate solidarity or, conversely, to justify workers’ mistreatment. This chapter builds on previous literature on gatekeeping encounters (Fiksdal 1990; Kerekes 2006) that examined interviewees’ strategies for influencing interview outcomes. By focusing on the discursive techniques employers use (e.g. linguistic accommodation), I argue that the semiotic resources of rapport and co-membership may be used to demarcate social distance or exploit vulnerable workers.

This paper examines the language ideologies among parents of Mexican family origin from Garden City, Kansas, and considers the ways in which Latinxs from different sociolinguistic generations have responded to an evolving societal context when making decisions about language use within the family. The analysis is based on 24 video-recorded interviews with parents of Mexican family background who reside in Garden City, a rural town in western Kansas where the majority of the population is of Hispanic origin. Drawing from the linguistic anthropological notion of ‘language ideologies’ (Woolard 1998) and the framework of family
langauge policy (King, Fogle, and Logan-Terry 2008), the study examines (a) the ideologies that the participants express about the value of Spanish and particular varieties of Spanish in Kansas, and (b) how they make reference to local language policies and personal beliefs and attitudes
when describing their home language policies. The analysis reveals that local language policies and the availability of resources can dramatically influence the ways in which participants’ linguistic policies and practices reflect their ideological positionings. Findings suggest that there is a need to expand resources for emergent bilinguals and multilingual families in the region.

http://lym.linguas.net/Download.axd?type=ArticleItem&id=68

RESUMEN

El propósito de este estudio es examinar las formas pronominales de segunda persona singular, específicamente el voseo, para determinar los patrones y contextos de su uso sociolingüístico y cómo sirve de marcador de identidad entre salvadoreños y hondureños en los Estados Unidos. A través de entrevistas sociolingüísticas y por medio de observaciones etnográficas con veinte individuos de origen o descendencia salvadoreña u hondureña, se adentra en la experiencia centroamericana en Oregon y Washington. Los datos preliminares muestran que el voseo es un fenómeno transnacional y sirve de rasgo sociolingüístico, afirmando origen o descendencia centroamericana, y es usado en los Estados Unidos entre centroamericanos y otros latinos (mexicanos, ecuatorianos, colombianos) si su relación alcanza el nivel de confianza requerido por el vos.

ABSTRACT

"Voseante’s transnationalism. Salvadorans and Hondurans in the United States"

This sociolinguistic study explores Central American Spanish, specifically second-person pronoun usage and the sociolinguistic use of "voseo" as an affirmation of Central American identity among Salvadorans and Hondurans in the United States. The Salvadoran and Honduran linguistic experience is examined through sociolinguistic interviews and ethnographic observations with twenty individuals of Salvadoran and Honduran origin and/or descent. Initial results indicate that the native "voseo" is being transplanted into U.S. Central American communities and is used as an affirmation of Central American identity, and within and between Central Americans and other Latinos (Mexican, Ecuadorian, Colombian) if their relationship reaches the level of "confianza"/trust required for the usage of "vos".

En el momento en el que California pasó a formar parte de los Estados Unidos en 1848, la lengua de los habitantes –que hasta entonces había sido mayoritariamente el español- quedó relegada a un segundo plano en favor del inglés. Es en este contexto en el que debemos entender el glosario de californianismos publicado por Bancroft en 1888. En él se incluyen como californianismos, tanto términos en español como otros en lenguas indígenas de California. En el presente trabajo analizaremos el contenido semántico del glosario, así como la relación que el autor establece entre los términos en español y los que proceden de otras lenguas. Con ello, pretendemos ofrecer luz sobre cómo entendía Bancroft los californianismos y, por extensión, la forma en que una sociedad de exponencial influencia anglosajona hizo frente a la realidad abrumadora de la presencia de hispanohablantes en su territorio.

The current study examines variable clitic placement (CP) in Spanish in a Mexican community in the metropolitan Atlanta area. By employing sociolinguistic interview data from 20 first-generation Mexican speakers, clitic frequencies and constraints are analyzed. Tokens of proclisis and enclisis were coded for linguistic and social factors that potentially influence clitic usage (e.g., topic persistence, specific clitic used, English proficiency, age, gender), and a logistic regression analysis was carried out using Rbrul (Daniel Johnson, 2009). Results indicate a proclisis rate of 64%, which is comparable to other varieties of Mexican Spanish. The regression analysis revealed that CP is sensitive to the particular construction used, the specific clitic, the presence of a pause, and the speaker’s gender. Additionally, English proficiency showed no effect on CP. This analysis supports previous research that CP is impermeable to contact-induced change and also reveals new conditioning factors (specific clitic, presence of a pause) that have not been examined in previous literature.

Variation in subject placement in Spanish (yo pienso vs. pienso yo) has been shown to be conditioned by multiple factors, such as clause type (e.g. Rivas 2013; Mayoral 2014), verb type (e.g. Mayoral 2007, 2014; Sánchez 2008), and information structure (e.g. Bentivoglio 2003; Rivas 2008, 2013), among others. Other factors, however, such as person/number, TMA, and priming are less studied (but see, e.g., Brown & Rivas 2011; Benevento & Dietrich 2014). The current paper uses sociolinguistic interview data from the Corpus of Spanish in Georgia (Limerick 2021) to examine pronominal subject placement among 20 first-generation Mexican immigrants in the Atlanta metro area, constituting the first study (to the best of my knowledge) to analyze this phenomenon in Southeastern U.S. Spanish. Linguistic predictors (e.g. person/number of the subject, TMA, verb type, priming) as well as social predictors (e.g. age, sex, English proficiency, preferred media language) were incorporated into logistic regression analyses, with results suggesting that subject pronoun placement is most strongly influenced by the person/number of the subject. In particular, third person singular pronouns favor postverbal subjects while other pronouns favor preverbal position. Regarding social predictors, both sex and preferred media language appeared to play significant roles in the initial analysis; however, upon considering individual outlier speaker effects, the only predictor that remained significant was media language, with the apparent effect of sex disappearing. The media language effect shows that those with a preference for English media favor preverbal subjects, suggesting a potential language contact effect. The present work contributes to our knowledge of subject placement by revealing new patterns for underexplored linguistic and social factors that influence its variation. Furthermore, the findings have implications for the study of language contact and change more broadly, demonstrating the importance of considering how individual speakers could misrepresent the overall data, interpretations of results, and conclusions in sociolinguistic studies.

There are two main dialects of New Mexican
Spanish. According to Bills & Vigil (2008), the Spanish spoken
in the northern part of the state (what they refer to as ‘Traditional
Spanish’) is characterized by the use of archaisms and Anglicisms
whereas the Spanish spoken in the southern part of the state (what
they refer to as ‘Border Spanish’) is characterized by the use of
Mexicanisms. As a result of increased Mexican immigration to the
north of the state in the past several decades, however, the use of
Mexicanisms has become quite common in the Traditional Spanish
of northern New Mexico, which may be leading to the leveling of
differences between the two dialects.
The current research focuses on the growing use of Mexicanisms
in the Spanish of northern New Mexico over the past three
decades. The use of Mexicanisms, archaisms, and Anglicisms is
compared using two small corpora of informal Spanish as it is spoken
in various cities and towns throughout northern New Mexico.
The first corpus is comprised of 18 interviews from the New Mexico-
Colorado Spanish Survey (NMCOSS) while the second consists
of 18 interviews recorded as part of another project from 2001
to 2010 in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Mora.
Results indicate that the Spanish of northern New Mexico includes
a much greater number of Mexicanisms than either Anglicisms
or archaisms and, for this reason, is much more similar to
Border Spanish than once thought. Moreover, the introduction of
Mexicanisms in the region seems to be driven by younger speakers,
perhaps due to peer interaction with the children of Mexican
immigrants. Given these findings, a new characterization of Northern
New Mexican Spanish should be considered in future studies.

Through an analysis of immigrant Spanish in Georgia, potential contact-induced language change is investigated through the lens of subject pronoun expression. Pronoun variation among Mexican speakers is examined using sociolinguistic interview data. Tokens of overt and null subject pronouns (N = 4,649) were coded for linguistic variables previously shown to constrain subject expression (e.g. person/number, tense-mood-aspect [TMA], polarity) as well as social variables (e.g. English proficiency, age), and then analysed using multivariate analyses in Rbrul. Results indicate an overall pronoun rate of 27%, which is slightly higher than what has been reported for monolingual Mexican Spanish. Several linguistic variables (e.g. person/number, switch-reference, morphological ambiguity, polarity) and one social variable (age) played a significant role in pronoun variation. Moreover, differential effects were revealed when compared to monolingual Mexican Spanish for variables such as TMA. These findings point in the direction of dialect contact influences and the presence of a unique variety of Mexican Spanish in the U.S.

La investigación sobre la pragmática de los hablantes de herencia (HH) de español sugiere que ellos comparten algunas características con los aprendices de español de segunda lengua en su producción de los actos de habla (Pinto y Raschio 2007); sin embargo, hace falta desarrollar una aproximación teórica para el análisis de estas similitudes. Basándose en un estudio sobre la realización de disculpas por HH de español que residen en Kansas, este artículo considera cómo se puede llegar a una mejor comprensión de las prácticas pragmáticas de los HH. Además, se propone una metodología para enseñar la pragmática fundamentada en la conciencia metapragmática de los estudiantes y considerando las prácticas discursivas de las varias comunidades en las que participan.

This paper examines, from a qualitative perspective, how adult bilingual Spanish-English Spanish speakers from the Riverside-San Bernardino metropolitan area choose to verbally express their feelings of paternal/maternal pride. The decision between Spanish and/or in English defines the sociolinguistic identity(es) that these adults convey: in that sense, code switching, code-mixing or picking one language over the other when adressing their children about pride reveals a different emotional approach to both languages.

Five primary caregivers with children four to ten years old were subjected to a laboratory-controlled sociolinguistic interview. The interviewers were bilingual speakers of Spanish and English of Mexican descent raised and educated in Southern California in bilingual homes and environments. They inquire about the caregiver’s use of English and Spanish, their transmission of both languages to their children and also about the expression of pride and dissapointment. In this pilot study, I explore the qualitative implications of the expression of pride in both Spanish and English. 

Preliminary results show that bilingual or Spanish dominant parents tend not to express their pride in Spanish in the same way they express it in English. They code-switch, code-mix or turn to English altogether when compelled to produce an “orgulloso” or semantically equivalent expression. This adaptation in progress will very likely alter the expression of pride in the emotional language acquired by the minors. This study, and the linguistic accommodation it reflects, provides a better understanding of the diachronic history of the dialect of Spanish of Southern California.




* “Emotional Bilingualism” is an interdisciplinary project co-PIed by the aforementioned, Dr Elizabeth Davis and Dr Scott Savage, from the University of California Riverside. The initial research has been funded by the Center for Ideas and Society at UC Riverside.

Typical of many non-dominant varieties of pluricentric languages, U.S. Spanish does not have a codified standard. In earlier studies, the author described the code-switching, subject pronoun use, nominal possession and verbal system which characterize the Spanish spoken in Utica, NY, U.S. Although those parameters do not constitute a prescriptive standard, they could form a type of "linguistic standard and quasi codification set through usage" (Muhr, 2013: 30). The present study continues to explore what might be a standard for Utica Spanish, and U.S. Spanish, in general, and compares the parameters mentioned above with those of written Spanish obtained from El despertar hispano-americano, a column published in the Utica newspaper Observer-Dispatch (O-D). The parameters exhibit very different values which might be explained by the existence of different standards which govern communicative functions.