English and Croatian In Contact: A Case Study of a Bilingual Immigrant

Deskar, Kristina. (2018). English and Croatian In Contact: A Case Study of a Bilingual Immigrant. Diploma Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of English Language and Literature. [mentor Starčević, Anđel].

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Abstract

This paper is a study of a bilingual Croatian immigrant in Australia. It examines the immigrant experience of an 81-year-old Croatian-born woman who left Croatia (Yugoslavia) in 1969 and settled in Australia. More specifically, I analyse the linguistic and extralinguistic experience of an immigrant coming to a society whose language she did not speak, and the way it influenced the experience. The paper focuses primarily on the bilingual linguistic patterns that are found in her spoken production and the ideologies behind her language use. The results show that the respondent has not acquired full competence in English, but she has never had any negative experience with native speakers of English in Australia. Even though she speaks English on a daily basis in Australia, she avoids code-switching, and uses just one language at a time. The code-switching instances that came up during the interview that was conducted in Croatian were mostly expressions that do not have a precise equivalent in Croatian, and borrowings were very scarce. The ideologies reflect her language attitudes which are influenced by her immigrant experience and interactions with local people while on vacation in Croatia. The ideologies she promotes include the pluralist ideology, the ideology of assimilation, the heteroglossic ideology and the ideology of territorialisation.

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