A sociolinguistic account of Japanese-Spanish bilinguals

This presentation focuses on the language contact situation of a community of Japanese-Spanish bilinguals in Valencia, Spain. The corpus comes from 13 speakers who are either Japanese immigrants themselves or second-generation... [ view full abstract ]

This presentation focuses on the language contact situation of a community of Japanese-Spanish bilinguals in Valencia, Spain. The corpus comes from 13 speakers who are either Japanese immigrants themselves or second-generation Japanese-Spanish bilinguals. Several sociolinguistic analyses will be presented, including an analysis of factors affecting maintenance and acquisition of Japanese as a minority language, an analysis of how Japanese gendered language is negotiated between mothers and sons, and an analysis of code-switching that includes word-internal switches. These analyses signal a situation of language shift, though linguistic similarities between Spanish and Japanese along with Japanese’s prestigious status make the contact situation unique. Findings and theoretical implications from these several studies (Flores 2016, Flores & Swalberg 2016) will be gathered and discussed.

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Flores, T. (2016). Declarative intonation in the Spanish of Japanese-Spanish bilinguals. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 29.    

doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/2.0000533

Flores, T & Swalberg, A. (2016). “Spanish-Japanese code-switching.” University of Utah Student Conference in Linguistics. Salt Lake City, UT. April 8, 2016.

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