Spanish in Colombia and New York City can be considered within the classical literature on linguistics and migration, as it deals with transformations of a language when it comes into contact with another language. The analysis is about the transformations of Colombian Costeño Spanish in Barranquilla (Colombia) and in New York City (US). The author focuses on two phenomena that are combined despite their opposing forces: the changes in Colombian Costeño Spanish from contact with English and other variants of Spanish, and the language structures that support its grammatical forms despite the spatial distance of the Spanish speakers. Orozco's main hypothesis is that Colombians in Barranquilla and in NYC are part of the same speech community. Following the Theory of Interdialectical Parallelism proposed by Gregory Guy, Orozco supports the idea that ‘the conditioning forces on language variation and change are consistent with different segments of a single speech community’ (156). In this way, Orozco argues that the variations found in the expressions under study are the result of internal constraints to the grammatical structure of Spanish as well as external pressures that are related to the personal and social trajectory of the subjects.

This book is original due to the quantitative analysis and data that the author provides. Orozco conducts sociolinguistic interviews with twenty-five Colombian speakers in Barranquilla and twenty Colombian speakers in NYC. Their interviewees vary in age, gender, social strata, educational background, and, in the case of Colombians in NYC, date of arrival in the US and residence duration. From these interviews, Orozco focuses on three variables: future time expression, subject pronoun variability, and nominal possession. The author unpacks these expressions in each chapter.

In chapter 2, Orozco proves statistically that in both groups, the most used future time expression is the periphrastic future: voy a escribir/I am going to write; to the detriment of simple future (escribiré/I will write) and the simple present (escribo/I write). In chapter 3 the author explains how and when Colombian speakers use possessive adjectives (mis amigos/my friends), definite articles (los amigos/the friends), and possessive periphrases (los amigos míos/the friends of mine). Chapter 4 is about the speakers’ preference between overt pronoun (él escribe/he writes) and null pronoun (escribe/writes). Finally, in chapter 5 Orozco intertwines the use of these expressions with social variables as age, economic and social capital, and gender.

Although other authors have pointed out that for Spanish speakers in general, some of the analyzed expressions are gaining more strength while others are decreasing, Orozco's quantitative results not only confirm that trend, but also show that the process has accelerated among speakers in contact with other forms of Spanish and with English. Another of Orozco's results is about gender differentiation: women in Barranquilla tend to use more ‘conservative’ language while women in NYC are the most ‘innovative’ speakers. Undoubtedly these results may interest researchers of Spanish, language, and migration, but also gender.