American Varieties

Talking with Mi Gente

The Distinctive Dialect of Chicano English
Summary

Carmen Fought in her report states that Chicano English is a distinctive variety of
English spoken by Mexican ethnic people in California and the Southwest, it has its own
features that make it an independent dialect and not a ‘’broken English’’. Some features
that difference Chicano English from American English are the pronunciation and the
meaning of some words, for instance, the ‘a’ sound, in words like saw¸ sounds as the
Spanish ’a’ and the word barely in Chicano English means that something happened
recently, while in American English this word means hardly.