engleski

“If Croatian beer is sold here, I want to ask for it in the language it belongs to”: Conflict, Divergence and Identity in a Case Study of a Croatian Family in Toronto

Earlier studies of contact between English and Croatian outside of Croatia (e.g. Jutronić 1971 ; Surdučki 1978 ; Filipović 1984 ; Hlavac 2003) have not addressed the micro-level of sociolinguistic analysis. This paper broadens the field by focusing on the qualitative results obtained through a case study of a four-member Croatian family in Toronto, Canada. It aims to answer two main questions: 1) is there any linguistic conflict between majority (English) and minority (Croatian) speakers in a country with an official multiculturalism policy? and 2) how is a minority (Croatian) speaker's self- and other-ascribed ethnic identity related to their knowledge of the associated language (Eastman and Reese 1981) and what language is it? The family – two generation 1A (b. 1938 and 1939) and two generation 1B (b. 1964 and 1968) speakers (Clyne 2003) – permanently left Croatia in 1974 and have since lived in Toronto. At the time of their immigration to Canada all the informants were Croatian monolinguals, except for the father of the family, who had spent several years working in Germany. The researcher spent a little under two months living with the informants and carried out semi-structured one-on-one and group interviews (Labov 1984). The research centres on the analysis of a) the informants' narratives and b) their communication patterns within and outside the family. The analysis pays special attention to instances of linguistic conflict (Nelde 1997), divergence as a form of communication accommodation (Sachdev and Giles 2006), and situated ethnic identity (Noels et al. 2004), as well as to the interplay of these phenomena in particular speech events in Canada and Croatia. The case study results show that linguistic conflict is present both between majority and minority speakers and within the minority community. The question of the national language(s) in the post-Yugoslav states is addressed from the perspective of diaspora Croats. Finally, the paper also introduces the concept of language breaker – formally modelled on the term language broker (Del Torto 2008) – with the meaning of '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'.

linguistic conflict; divergence; identity; language breaker

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