El Español Rururbano: The Urbanization of Rural Mexican Spanish in Southern California

Franny Brogan
Spanish and Portuguese
UC Los Angeles

Because the majority of Spanish-speaking immigrants in Southern California are of rural Mexican origin, features of Los Angeles vernacular Spanish (as specified by Parodi, 2004) are founded in this dialectal variety. It is clear that the rural Mexican dialect is undergoing koineization, the process by which a new variety of a language emerges from the mixing, in Los Angeles; however, the characterization of this process as urbanization, as has been suggested in the existing literature, remains unjustifiable as long as the data is restricted to Los Angeles. The comparative study examines the juxtaposition of Spanish dialects in rural and urban Southern California, with a focus on phonetic (sound-based) variation. Utilizing a modified version of the classic sociolinguistic interview employed by Labov (1963), linguistic data from 20 speakers: ten from the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area and ten from rural Imperial County, located in the southeast corner of California, was gathered.