A contrastive analysis of English influences on the lexicon of Puerto Rican Spanish in Puerto Rico and St. Croix

Although Puerto Rico and St. Croix are U.S. territories and are only a few miles apart from each other, English plays a different role in each one. In Puerto Rico, Spanish is used as the official and majority language, with English as a second language. In contrast, English is used as the official and majority language in St. Croix and Spanish is a second language. Nonetheless, both Spanish varieties have been tremendously influenced by English, especially in the lexicon, and aspects of the borrowing and use of English-derived words within the Spanish spoken on both islands deserve further study.;My research questions were: (1) Which Spanish phonological and morphological features are used to integrate English lexical items into the Spanish spoken by Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico and St. Croix? (2) Do English lexical items retain the same amount of their original English phonology and morphology in the Spanish spoken by Puerto Ricans in St. Croix as compared to the Spanish spoken by Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico? (3) What conditions and factors encourage or discourage code switching (i.e., any use of English and Spanish within or between sentences) in these Puerto Rican communities? and (4) What percentage of loanwords will be found in the focus group discussions of the two groups?;I show that English lexical items are phonologically and morphologically integrated into the word class system of the Spanish spoken by young adult Porto Crucians (i.e., Crucians of Puerto Rican descent) in essentially the same way and to the same extent that English lexical items are phonologically and morphologically integrated into the word class system of the Spanish spoken by young adult Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico. However, there were differences between the Spanish of Puerto Ricans and that of Porto Crucians with regard to which words are borrowed and the extent of code switching.