Language Choice in U.S. Latina First Person Narrative: The Effects of Language Standardization and Subordination
For a phenomenon that was considered not to exist by the leading expert in bilingualism less than fifty years ago, code-switching has come a long way, baby.2 Actually, it is not the practice of codeswitching, but rather its study, which has flourished over the past quarter of a century. Previously considered a kind of deviant linguistic behavior which indicated a speaker's inability to separate the two languages at her or his disposal, linguists now recognize codeswitching as a functional linguistic behavior which demonstrates the speaker's ability to manipulate the grammar and lexicon of two languages at the same time. John Lipski finds that "[T]here is a certain justice to be found in the fact that the language behavior of a group for so long considered linguistically deficient is now proving to be the most fertile territory for the investigation of all levels of bilingualism" (208). While the study of code-switching is remarkable in its interdisciplinarity, the two fields of literary criticism and socio-linguistics allow for a more thorough exploration of the landscape in which this Spanish-English literary language mixing takes place. This paper investigates the use of Spanish in predominantly English U.S. Latina narratives, focusing on factors which affect language choice (language proficiency and the social
The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry
A community transplanted from what they now view as an island paradise, these Puerto Rican families yearn for the colors and tastes of their former home. As they carve out lives as Americans, their days are filled with drama, success, and sometimes tragedy. A widow becomes crazy after her son is killed in Vietnam, her remaining word "nada." Another woman carries on after the death of her husband, keeping their store, filled with plantain, Bustello coffee, jamon y queso, open as a refuge for her neighbors. And there are Cofer's stories of growing up with a dictatorial and straying father, a caring mother, and a love for language that will lead to a career as a teacher and writer.
Early Missionaries and the Ethnolinguistic Factor During the ‘Invention of Tribalism’ in Zimbabwe
There is evidence from across the disciplines that at least some of the contemporary regional names of African tribes, dialects and languages are fairly recent inventions in historical terms. This article offers some evidence from Zimbabwe to show that missionary linguistic politics were an important factor in this process. The South African linguist Clement Doke was brought in to resolve conflicts about the orthography of Shona. His Report on the Unification of the Shona Dialects (1931) shows how the language politics of the Christian denominations, which were also the factions within the umbrella organization the Southern Rhodesia Missionary Conference, contributed quite significantly to the creation and promotion of Zezuru, Karanga and Manyika as the main groupings of dialects in the central area which Doke later accommodated in a unified orthography of a unified language that was given the name Shona. While vocabulary from Ndau was to be incorporated, words from the Korekore group in the north were to be discouraged, and Kalanga in the West was allowed to be subsumed under Ndebele. Writing about sixty years later, Ranger focusses more closely on the Manyika and takes his discussion to the 1940s, but he also mentions that the Rhodesian Front government of the 1960s and 1970s deliberately incited tribalism between the Shona and the Ndebele, while at the same time magnifying the differences between the regional divisions of the Shona, which were, in turn, played against one another as constituent clans. It would appear then that, for the indigenous Africans, the price of Christianity, Western education and a new perception of language unity was the creation of regional ethnic identities that were at least potentially antagonistic and open to political manipulation. Through many decades of rather unnecessary intellectual justification, and as a result of the collective colonial experience through the churches, the schools and the workplaces, these imposed identities, and the myths and sentiments that are associated with them, have become fixed in the collective mind of Africa, and the modern nation states of the continent now seem to be stuck with them. Missionaries played a very significant role in creating this scenario because they were mainly responsible for fixing the ethnolinguistic maps of the African colonies during the early phase of European occupation. To a significant degree, these maps have remained intact and have continued to influence African research scholarship.