Liberating Silent Voices

Over the past several decades, growth of the Dominican community in New York City has led to an increase of young Dominicans in public universities. The influx of a majority of Dominican females has presented an opportunity to study the nature of Dominican females linguistic and social adjustment to life in New York City and to life in the University setting. The presence of a majority of Dominican females in the university system and the scarcity of literature chronicling their experience from their own perspectives is the impetus for the work presented in this publication. This ethnography provides a sociolinguistic study of young college-age, first-generation university students in their own voices. The unedited, first-person account of their experience should help shed light on the essence of Dominican female identity in the context of their lives and studies in social and academic Communities of Practice in America, dispelling myths concerning immigrant status and linguistic triumph in an English-speaking country. This work is especially useful to students and scholars of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology and related fields.