Spanish and English in Small Town and Rural America: Language Contact Leading to Language Shift

This book examines Spanish English bilingual patterns in a small town and rural Northeast Georgia community of Hispanics recently immigrated from Mexico and other areas of Latin America. Speech data from naturally-occurring conversations by 56 children and adults of both sexes are analyzed within Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model. Eight language patterns are identified, including monolingual Spanish and English turns, codeswitched turns, and turns showing convergence (morphemes/words from one language with grammatical structure from the other). Tokens of each type (per sentence or short conversational turn) were counted per informant. Analysis reveals that percentages of monolingual and codeswitched utterances pattern in relation to percentages of utterances showing convergence, indicating that informants’ Spanish does not begin to converge toward English until fewer than 70% of their utterances are monolingual Spanish and that both codeswitching and convergence are mechanisms of language shift from dominance in one language to another. Several associated social factors of the informants, including age, gender, and country of origin, expand understanding of the linguistic and shift patterns. The percentages of the different language types also indicate abrupt shifts from predominance of one language type to another. This ’snapshot’ of a language shift in process and the abruptness of the shifts in stages is the unique observation of this study that has not been reported by other language contact researchers. The book also addresses the simultaneous acquisition of Spanish and English by young children and implications for education. The book will be of interest to students, teachers, and researchers of linguistics, sociolinguistics, bilingual education, and Spanish English contact specifically.

Daniel James Smith is Associate Professor of Spanish at Clemson University, USA. He has published his research on Spanish English bilingualism and language acquisition in The International Journal of Bilingualism, the Southwest Journal of Linguistics, the Southern Journal of Linguistics, the Bilingual Research Journal, and The Bilingual Review, among others.