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For generations, the unique mix of Spanish and English on the U.S.–Mexico border—with words like parquear (“to park”) and troca (“truck”)—was dismissed as “improper.” Now, a massive scientific effort is preserving it in digital archives, granting it the legitimacy it deserves.

Lay Summary Since William Labov outlined the methodology for the sociolinguistic interview in 1972, sociolinguistic corpora have been used widely in the field of sociolinguistics to study diverse speech communities and linguistic features. However, most of these invaluable sociolinguistic collections have been available only to the individual researcher or research group, and these data sets usually disappear from use with that individual scholar.

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