1026: Chicano Vowel Shift Sep 30, 2017

When speakers of two or more languages, or speakers of two dialects, come into contact with each other enough, certain traits will eventually merge somewhat. Historically, Spanish has had a great deal of influence on English, but more modernly, Mexican Spanish spoken in and near the United States has led to vowel-changes in certain dialects of American English. In Chicano English spoken by Mexican Americans in places like the American Southwest and Chicago, as well as Californian, several shifts have occurred. The "cot–caught merger", which makes /a/ and /ɔ/ appear indistinguishable (present in the two words respectively) is complete, as well as the "salary–celery merger" which merges /æ/ and /ɛ/ before /l/, and also the /ɪ/ in 'sing' (/sɪŋ/) becomes /i/ like in 'see', which also happens in Californian English. Also, make long vowels become monophthongal, but this is a feature of Great Lakes accent as well, and has much less to do with Spanish. These are just a few of the many features that change due to exposure to to Spanish, though any dialect will change on its own given enough time, with or without external influence such as this.