Migrants and language change M. Cristina Caimotto

Migrants in ethnic communities  Migrants entering a new country tend to settle in ethnic neighbourhoods  They need to find a sociolinguistic niche  They play an important role as agents of language change, but are often overlooked because they do not speak the language as native speakers (Horvath 90)

Sydney: a multilingual speech community  Analysis of how migrants begin to fit in the sociolinguistic patterns and what effect they have on them. (Horvath 91)

Mitchell and Delbridge  Australian English (AE) in the forties  Broad 34%  General 55%  Cultivated 11% Variation in the vowels = main differentiation More prestige Less prestige

Australian English: the present  1 extra label: Ethnic Broad (EB) (need to distinguish the products of interference from the first language)  Identification of groups of speakers who share similar patterns of pronunciation of the selected vowels SOCIOLECTS (patterns of linguistic variation and patterns of social variation) (93)

 There is no variety in which only one of the variants is present and all the others absent. In fact there was not a single speaker in the sample who used only one variant of any of the vowels studies (96)

Change in progress  Changes from the first to the second generation.  The role of nationalism (101)

Code-switching (Poplack) Knowledge required:  bilingual ability of the informant in each of the languages  the detailed nature of the two monolingual codes in question  the existence of particular community- specific or “compromise” solutions (Poplack 45)

Spanish/English contact among Puerto Ricans in New York  “skilled” or fluent code-switching: smooth transition between L1 and L2 elements (46) linguistic problems  word order (47)  morphophonological conflict Highly developed linguistic skills in both languages

3 switch types in East Harlem  tag  sentential  intrasentential (47)  Difficulties in establishing whether we are dealing with a code-switch or a loanword.

Ottawa-Hull French language  seen as having less instrumental value  “unfairness”  linguistic insecurity vis-à-vis European French The English way of saying is often shorter, more succinct and more apt or expressive

Reasons (52)  Mot juste  Discussing language /metalinguistic commentary  attention to the English intervention  Translating Report speech Proper names False start, self-correction and disfluencies

Differences  Where the Puerto Ricans code-switched in a way which minimized the salience of the switch points, and where the switches formed part of an overall discourse strategy to use both languages, the Ottawa-Hull speakers do the contrary.  WHY?

Differences - reasons  Maybe differences in data collection techniques  But the results may also represent a true difference in communicative patterns  Issue of prestige (56)

Conclusions  It is hard to draw a simple deterministic view of bilingual behaviour.  Both the analysis of English in Sidney and those of code-switching in New York and in Ottawa-Hull are useful tools to understand some patterns of language change due to the presence of more than one language.

Thank you