Language is the main means for human beings to express themselves, and for this reason it is part of the culture that grows and changes as societies do. The main objective of this article is to define the Spanish used by the Spanish-speaking inhabitants of the United States (California and New York), from a phraseological point of view, taking into account the diatopic linguistic variety, the influence of English and the diglossia in which it lives. modern North American Spanish. Since phraseology is a very broad field, this study is limited to a specific group of phraseological units: verbal locutions. Likewise, the subject is approached considering other areas of knowledge such as sociolinguistics, analyzing the behavior of society and language, as well as cognition, attending to the pragmatic component that plays a decisive role in the development of a language in a given society. © Author(s)