Growing up Bilingual Puerto Rican Children in New York

This book provides an inside view of the social construction of bilingualism in one of the largest and most disadvantaged Spanish-speaking groups in the United States. It walks readers through a New York Puerto Rican Community and describes the five varieties of Spanish and English that constitute the community's bilingual and multi-dialectal repertoire, the four major communication patterns that predominate in the homes of twenty families with children, and the syntactic features and discourse strategies of so-called Spanglish.

Ana Celia Zentella, an anthro-political linguist, is Professor in the Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, and in Anthropology, Linguistics, and Developmental Psychology at the City University of New York Graduate Center.