Spanish/English Bilingual Children in the Southeastern USA: Convergence and Codeswitching

ABSTRACT The fastest growing Hispanic population centers in the United States are currently in the Southeast. In one Georgia community, immigrant children from Mexico, Central America, and South America use Spanish and English together in sentences. This paper compares the bilingual structures of sentences that show codeswitching between Spanish and English and those showing grammatical convergence of Spanish (L1) and English (L2) along with comparisons of the social backgrounds of the speakers who produced the sentences. Codeswitching samples maintain Spanish grammatical patterns, but with English morphemes inserted. Convergence samples show use of all Spanish morphemes, with grammatical influence from English. Codeswitching is more frequent than convergence among children who interact frequently with other Spanish-speaking children and who use Spanish more than English at home. Convergence occurs more frequently than codeswitching when children have fewer interactions in Spanish and more interactions in English as compared to their peers who codeswitch more frequently. Therefore, more interaction in English results in L1 speakers of Spanish being able to keep their Spanish sentences free of English morphemes but not free of English grammar. In contrast, less interaction in English results in L1 speakers of Spanish being able to maintain standard Spanish grammatical patterns in large part free of English grammatical influence but not free of English morphemes. KEY WORDS: language contact, bilingualism, codeswitching, convergence Introduction In the United States the southeastern states have the fastest growing Hispanic population. The four states that have been most affected by this phenomenon by 2000 were North Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia, and Tennessee. Of these four states, Georgia had the largest population of Hispanics that year (Pew Hispanic Center 2006; U.S. Census 2000). A community of Hispanics in northeast Georgia in the counties of Habersham, Banks, and Stephens are mostly of Mexican descent, but some are also from South and Central America and the Caribbean. Differing social backgrounds and living situations have affected the way children deal with using two languages, Spanish and English, in this language contact situation. Some children codeswitch with little to no grammatical influence from English, their second language (L2), on their home and first language (L1), Spanish. Other children use Spanish greatly influenced by English grammatical patterns. The results of this study have important implications for bilingual and second language instruction. Data Collection The data were collected for a larger study (Smith 2002) (1) from 56 members of the Hispanic community of Habersham, Banks, and Stephens Counties in Georgia. Of these 56 study participants, 30 were children, aged 7-13 years, and 26 were adults, aged 20-65 years. There were 14 female children, 16 male children, 14 female adults, and 12 male adults. The 56 participants in the study were audio-recorded in natural conversational settings in which they could use either English or Spanish or any combination thereof. Language Types in the Data Using Myers-Scotton's (1993[1997], 2002) Matrix Frame model as the basis for sentence analysis, turns and sentences within turns were classified as one of the following: * monolingual Spanish * monolingual English * codeswitching (CS) * convergence of Spanish and English grammatical patterns in the same sentence Monolingual Spanish turns or sentences, as in example (1), have no English morphemes or grammatical structure from English. Monolingual English turns or sentences, as in example (2), have no Spanish morphemes or grammatical structure from Spanish. (1) Monolingual Spanish. All the morphemes and grammatical structures are Spanish. En la escuela te hablan todos en ingles o en espanol? …