[4] Communities of Spanish-speaking Tejanos, Nuevomexicanos, Californios, and Mission Indians have existed in the American Southwest since the area was part of New Spain's Provincias Internas.
Most of the historically Hispanophone populations eventually adopted English as their first language, as part of their overall Americanization.
[5] The phonological inventory of Chicano English speakers appears to be identical to that of the local Anglo community.
As Hispanics are of diverse racial origins, Chicano English serves as the distinction from non-Hispanic and non-Latino Americans in the Southwest.
This language ideology is linked to negative perceptions about Chicano Americans and Hispanics in general.
[8] Chicano English also has a complex set of nonstandard English intonation patterns, such as pitch rises on significant words in the middle and at the end of sentences as well as initial-sentence high pitches, which are often accompanied by the lengthening of the affected syllables.
[19] The distinction between /ɪ/ and /i/ before liquid consonants is often reduced in some Chicano accents, making fill and feel homophones.
Also, such vowels are underlyingly long monophthongs so the general effect thus is to simplify the system of phonetic implementation, compared to the /ɪi, eɪ, oʊ, ʊu/ of many other English dialects.
Its precise boundaries are difficult to delineate, perhaps because of its separate origins of the dialect in the Southwest and the Midwest.
[26] That said, a later study examining the speech of college students in Albuquerque failed to find evidence of /u/ being laxed to [ʊ] or of /ʌ/ becoming lowered to [ɑ̈].