engleski

English and Croatian in Canada: bilingualism between language contact and language conflict

This paper deals with the previously disregarded micro-level of the sociolinguistic analysis of Croatian immigration into Canada. It is based on the qualitative results obtained through a case study of a Croatian-Canadian family and focuses on linguistic contact and conflict involving English (as an official language) and Croatian (as a minority language). The family – two generation 1A speakers and two generation 1B speakers (Clyne 2003) – left Croatia in 1974 and have since lived in Toronto. At the time of their immigration all the respondents were Croatian monolinguals, except for the father, who had spent several years working in Germany. The researcher spent a little under two months living with the family and carried out semi-structured one-on-one and group interviews (Labov 1984). The research centers on the analysis of a) their narratives and b) their communication patterns within and outside the family. The analysis pays special attention to instances of linguistic conflict (Nelde 1997) between the associated languages (Eastman and Reese 1981), divergence as a form of communication accommodation (Sachdev and Giles 2006), and situated ethnic identity (Noels et al. 2004). More specifically, the study investigates the interplay of these phenomena with language ideologies (e.g. the standard language ideology, the monoglossic ideology, and the native speaker ideology) in particular speech events in Canada, Croatia, and Germany. The results show that linguistic conflict is present in various forms a) between majority and minority speakers, b) between speakers from different minority groups, and c) within the Croatian community. The paper also introduces the concept of language breaker, formally modeled on the term language broker (e.g. Del Torto 2008) and defined as 'an individual who demotivates a bi- or multilingual speaker in their attempts to improve one of their languages by overly and repeatedly criticizing the quality of the speaker's language production'.

language contact, immigrant bilingualism, English, Croatian, language conflict, language breaker

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