Southern-Bred Hispanic English: An Emerging Socioethnic Variety * Walt Wolfram, Mary E. Kohn, and Erin Callahan-Price North Carolina State University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University 1. Introduction * Most sociolinguistic descriptions of Hispanic English in the US have focused on relatively stable, durable communities, such as the Mexican-American communities of the Southwest (Peñalosa 1980; Ornstein-Galicia 1984; Galindo 1987; Santa Ana 1991; Fought 2003; Mendoza Denton 2008) or Hispanic communities in urban area of the northeastern US (Wolfram 1974; Poplack 1978; Newman 2007). These descriptions naturally recognize that these varieties combine substrate features from the historical language contact situation with vernacular traits and regional dialect features of American English in various constellations to form distinctive socioethnic varieties. For example, Fought (2003) and Mendoza Denton (2008) observe that Chicano English in Southern California combines structural traits that include substrate influence from Spanish, regional Southern California dialect traits, features from vernacular African American English, and even characteristics associated with stereotypical of English. While durable Hispanic communities have existed in some regions of the US for centuries now, other regions in the US, including urban and rural regions in the Mid-Atlantic South, are just beginning to witness the emergence of enduring Hispanic communities. Between 1990 and 2010, for example, more than a million migrants from Mexico, El Salvador, and other Central and South American countries, settled in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Subsequently, states such as North Carolina and Georgia experienced the highest percentage of growth in their Latin American population, and now have the largest percentages of monolingual Spanish speakers. Figure 1, from Kasarda and Johnson (2006) shows the dramatic regional shift in the immigration flow at the turn of the twenty-first century. Figure 1. Change in Hispanic percentage from 1990-2000 * Funding for research reported here was provided by NSF grants BCS-0542139 and BCS-0843865. Special thanks to Erik R. Thomas, Robin Dodsworth, Phillip Carter, and Becky Moriello for their assistance in the research. © 2011 Walt Wolfram, Mary E. Kohn, and Erin Callahan-Price. Selected Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics, ed. Jim Michnowicz and Robin Dodsworth, 1-13. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.