Generational change in the conditioning of coda /r/ manner of articulation in Lorain Puerto Rican Spanish

Abstract Variationist research typically focuses on monolingual speakers of majority languages, leaving change in minority languages understudied, especially in diasporic communities. Addressing this gap, we analyze interview data from 16 Puerto Ricans in Lorain, Ohio, to examine social and linguistic constraints on the manner of articulation of coda /r/ ( N = 2,363) across three sociolinguistic generations (G1, G1.5, G2). We find that the conditioning of /r/ in the first generation is attenuated by G2. Specifically, the pattern in G1 whereby women produce significantly more prescriptively normative taps and fricatives than men is absent in G2 women, who produce lenited variants (approximants and deletions) at the same rate as men. The conditioning of /r/ by the manner of articulation of the following sound is similarly absent in the second generation. However, the influence of preceding vowel height and speaker origin remains consistent across generations. We posit that the shifts in coda /r/ conditioning result from a combination of language-internal and language-external factors whereby the tendency in Caribbean varieties of Spanish to weaken coda consonants is promoted by forces in the contact environment.