Written Spanish in the United States: an analysis of the Spanish of the ethnic press.

This article presents the quantitative results of a preliminary trend study on written Spanish in the U.S. using the Spanish language press as the source of written corpus. English does impact more on U.S. Spanish than on Spanish written in monolingual Spanish countries. The degree of difference of written Spanish in Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico with regard to English influence is tremendous. Taking Cuban Spanish as the reference point, Mexico has four times the English influences, whereas Puerto Rico has nine times the amount. The composite figures which make up the U.S. and monolingual norms differed by one and a half times. Spanish in the U.S. is downgraded not merely because English impacts on it much more than it does in monolingual societies, but because it is the language of a poor minority. When the ethnic community in the U.S. is in close social contact with the country of origin, the Spanish written in the U.S. closely resembles that written in the monolingual country. That is, Spanish written in Los Angeles, California and in New York is affected by English to a degree that closely resembles the impact of English on Spanish in Mexico and Puerto Rico. However, the difference between the Spanish written in Miami, Florida and that in Cuba with regard to English influence is enormous.