Language Choice in U.S. Latina First Person Narrative: The Effects of Language Standardization and Subordination

Abstract

For a phenomenon that was considered not to exist by the leading expert in less than fifty years ago, code-switching has come a long way, baby.2 Actually, it is not the practice of codeswitching, but rather its study, which has flourished over the past quarter of a century. Previously considered a kind of deviant linguistic behavior which indicated a speaker's inability to separate the two languages at her or his disposal, linguists now recognize codeswitching as a functional linguistic behavior which demonstrates the speaker's ability to manipulate the grammar and lexicon of two languages at the same time. John Lipski finds that [T]here is a certain justice to be found in the fact that the language behavior of a group for so long considered linguistically deficient is now proving to be the most fertile territory for the investigation of all levels of bilingualism (208). While the study of code-switching is remarkable in its interdisciplinarity, the two fields of literary criticism and socio-linguistics allow for a more thorough exploration of the landscape in which this Spanish-English literary language mixing takes place. This paper investigates the use of Spanish in predominantly English U.S. Latina narratives, focusing on factors which affect language choice (language proficiency and the social

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