A minority within a minority

Abstract We explore self-reported use of the second-person singular pronoun vos by a group of speakers of Central American Spanish in the state of Nebraska. A specific case of interdialectal contact that takes place in five non-metropolitan communities in the Midwest is described. All speakers included in this study lived or had grown up in communities with low ethnolinguistic vitality for Spanish and intense contact with speakers of Mexican American and Mexican Spanish. Our analysis focuses on the pronoun vos because it is a feature absent from the dialects of Spanish spoken by the majority of Latinx Nebraskans, and because its use and intergenerational transmission are closely inosculated with social meaning. Respondents’ articulation of their sociolinguistic experience describes a situation that includes complex processes of language brokering, acquisition, loss, inter- and intra-dialectal contact, and intra- generational language planning. Three forces that foster the use of vos by speakers of Central American varieties of Spanish in Nebraska, and three factors that hinder it are identified.