English and Croatian in contact on the example of diaspora speakers

Jurašin, Lucija. (2017). English and Croatian in contact on the example of diaspora speakers. Diploma Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of English Language and Literature. [mentor Starčević, Anđel and Kalogjera, Damir].

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Abstract

This thesis deals with the subject of Croatian-English bilingualism and various contact phenomena between those languages, as exemplified in the speech of seven bilinguals, aged 10-86, who moved back to Croatia after living in the United States. The participants belonged to generations 1A, 1B, 2A and 2/3, as defined by Haugen. For this thesis a semi-structured sociolinguistic interview was carried out with each of the participants, which enabled better access to the speakers' vernacular, as well as collecting a wealth of data. The analysis deals with the types of crosslinguistic influence present in the speech of the participants, which are found at all levels of language – from phonology to semantics. Furthermore, the reasons that govern their codeswitching are also explored and shown to be related to situational contexts and topics being discussed. The study also looks for possible signs of 1) language attrition in the production of Generation 1A speakers, which turn out to be absent and 2) incomplete (heritage) language acquisition in the production of Generation 1B, 2A and 2/3 speakers, which are found in the interviews with the Generations 1B and 2/3 speakers, but not in the speech of the Generation 2A speaker. In addition, one of the foci of this study is also language attitudes and preferences, which are shown to be diverse and related to different sociolinguistic phenomena.

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