Bilingualism – Page 4 – Languaged Life

The Power of Bilingualism: Cultural Identification Amongst LA Bilinguals

Marnie Cavanaugh, Reese Gover, Ethan Lee, Elisa Marin, Eva Reyman

Did you know that Los Angeles is the second most bilingual city in the US? Intrigued by the relevance of this topic, we were interested in taking a deeper dive into how the bilingual experience in LA shapes cultural identification and belonging, focusing on bilingual Spanish speakers. Although bilingualism can allow someone to connect to a broader range of people, we hypothesized at the beginning of our research that English-Spanish bilinguals in LA may feel cultural isolation. Feeling too American to connect to Hispanic culture, but with the knowledge of the Spanish language, too Hispanic to fit into American mainstream culture. However, our research concluded that being bilingual does not hinder one’s ability to connect with multicultural communities. Rather, bilingualism enhances it. Bilingualism helps thousands in the LA area connect with their Hispanic culture through the use of Spanish and American mainstream culture through their knowledge of English. Speech communities become expanded through their understanding of two or more languages. Cultural identification does not have to mean choosing one culture over the other. Many bilingual individuals choose to identify cross-culturally. Bilingualism in the LA area seems to be a tool to form greater connections rather than a tool that inhibits one’s ability to understand their cultural identification.

Introduction and Background

Our project examines Spanish-English bilingualism within Los Angeles, specifically focusing on how speaking Spanish and English affects the size and strength of speakers’ speech communities. Our community of practice is Spanish-English bilinguals who primarily reside in Los Angeles. Among this population, we studied the narrative aspects of language and language in use, asking bilinguals to tell their own stories through a mix of semi-structured interviews and survey responses. Using these methods, we examined how Spanish-English bilinguals in L.A. utilize their knowledge of both languages to signal belonging in various speech communities and how their bilingualism affects the communities to which they belong. Our main questions are: What role does Spanish-English bilingualism play in the size of one’s speech community within Los Angeles? Does Spanish-English bilingualism lead to increased community, or does it cause feelings of isolation? We hypothesized that, though bilingualism may theoretically create larger speech communities, Spanish-English bilinguals in L.A. may feel isolated from English- and Spanish-speaking communities.

Bilingualism is a trait that most people in the world share (Schroeder et al. 2017). But much of the bilingual experience is yet to be discovered. Our focus on the development of cultural identity amongst Spanish-English bilinguals in Los Angeles fits within the knowledge gaps in previous research surrounding this topic.

Ana Sanchez-Munoz (2018) discusses Los Angeles as a bilingual, bicultural city, emphasizing the unique role that Spanish and English speakers play in creating their sociolinguistic environment. Her research examines language practices in educational settings, finding that English is more commonly spoken than Spanish, suggesting that Spanish-English bilinguals may assume different linguistic identities in formal (i.e., educational) and casual settings. Thus, we were inspired to obtain data on the languages that Spanish-English bilinguals utilize more often in different social environments.

Likewise, Norma Mendoza-Denton and Bryan James Gordon (2011) argue that Hispanic identity is mediated through language ideologies prioritizing English speakers over Spanish speakers. Bilinguals occupy a liminal space, where they’re privileged over non-English speakers, especially in professional settings, and pressured to fit within an English-majority society through linguistic assimilation (Mendoza-Denton & Gordon 2011). Their research provides a framework for us to formulate interview questions surrounding participants’ feelings of inclusion/exclusion within English- and Spanish-speaking communities.

Moreover, Carmen Silva-Corvolan (1986) observed 27 Spanish-English bilinguals in East L.A., researching the effects of linguistic contact between multiple languages. She found that where consistent language contact occurs, linguistic simplification often follows. This is important to consider not only to understand how bilinguals may have differing levels of fluency in different languages but also because the shifts in language unique to Los Angeles bilinguals suggest the formation of unique, bilingual-focused speech communities.

Research focusing on the cognitive and developmental aspects of bilingualism helped structure our survey and interview questions. Raluca Barac and Ellen Bialystok (2012) discuss the effects of bilingualism on cognitive ability. A survey of 104 bilingual and monolingual six-year-olds found that bilingual children performed better on cognitive tasks when they received instructions in their primary language (Barac & Bialystok 2012). The findings from this study suggest that Spanish-English bilinguals may feel more comfortable utilizing the language they learned first and thus participate more in the speech communities associated with their primary language.

This literature review provided us with a baseline of knowledge. It structured our methods, allowing us to explore the topic of cultural identification among Spanish-English bilinguals in Los Angeles in an informed, systematic manner. Our findings suggest that contrary to our hypothesis, speaking Spanish is integral to participants’ feelings of inclusion in both Spanish and English speech communities. The majority of participants reported feelings of belonging to both language communities. Additionally, many participants noted that bilingualism was a beneficial attribute in their personal and professional lives.

Methods

We used three different methods of data collection to provide our project with a well-rounded, comprehensive understanding of our topic. First, we utilized a review of relevant literature (noted above) to provide context and relevant information for our research. As well, the knowledge gaps we identified justified our research questions. Second, we used a 14-question survey incorporating True/False, Likert scale, and optional open-ended questions. The criteria for survey respondents were that they are Spanish-English bilinguals primarily residing in Los Angeles; responses were anonymous, though demographic data (age, gender, primary language) was collected. Finally, we utilized a 15-question, semi-structured interview to gain in-depth, qualitative data. Each group member conducted one interview, resulting in five interviews. Similarly to survey participants, interviewees were required to be Spanish-English bilinguals primarily residing in Los Angeles. Interviews lasted 20-30 minutes each. The observable elements of communication we studied included participants’ fluency in both languages, the speech communities they most identified with and participated in, and feelings of isolation or inclusion regarding speech communities.

Results and Analysis

We first surveyed Spanish-English bilingualism and received nineteen responses. The survey had twelve demographic, multiple choice, true/false, and Likert-scale type questions, as well as two optional open-ended questions, where respondents could expand on their previous answers. We received seven responses for these open-ended questions, which expanded on the question, “Do you ever feel isolated from one culture because you don’t know Spanish/English enough to feel included?” We also received eight responses expanding on the true/false statement, “Bilingualism helps me more than it hurts me.” The survey questions and responses are shown in Figures 1, 2, and 3 below.

Figure 1: Responses to survey question: “Do you ever feel isolated from one culture because you don’t know Spanish/English enough to feel included?”

Figure 2: Responses to survey prompt: “Bilingualism helps me more than it hurts me”

Figure 3: Responses to survey question: “Which culture do you identify more with?”

After the survey, we each conducted one interview. Table 1 provides select quotes from each interview, along with the main themes that these quotes suggest. Out of five interviewees, two specifically mentioned feeling insecure speaking Spanish and fearing they would be made fun of for their speaking ability, one interviewee stated “[in Argentina] I don’t feel like I’m Hispanic enough”. The other two interviewees didn’t mention personal experiences of feeling isolated. Despite citing feelings of isolation, interviewees also spoke about how bilingualism is beneficial. Interviewees stated that their speech community is larger and their connection to their heritage increased due to their ability. Bilingualism was seen as a positive trait that they desired to pass on.

Table 1: Quotes from interviews with five Spanish-English bilinguals

Discussion and Conclusions

Throughout the study, we found our original hypothesis that Spanish-English bilinguals would feel isolated to be generally incorrect. Our interviewees claim that being bilingual has aided them in the way of social and professional opportunities, with one stating “I’ve had more educational opportunities since I do research in Spanish [at university]”. While two of our interviewees explicitly expressed insecurity about speaking Spanish, it was a general feeling among our interviewees that bilingualism made them feel included. Our interviewees see their bilingualism as a crucial part of their identity and a method for connecting with their heritage. Interviewees cited connection to culture as a main reason for wanting to pass on bilingualism. The data collected is useful for understanding the importance of language to Hispanic identity in Spanish-English bilinguals.

References

Ahearn, L. M. (2021). Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology. Wiley Blackwell.

Barac, R., & Bialystok, E. (2012). Bilingual Effects on Cognitive and Linguistic Development: Role of Language, Cultural Background, and Education. Child Development, 83(2), 413–422. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41416093

Mendoza-Denton, N., & Gordon, B. J. (2011). Language and Social Meaning in Bilingual Mexico and the United States. In The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics (pp. 553–578). Wiley-Blackwell. https://www.norma-mendoza-denton.com/_files/ugd/e4ef1f_932d492a6a7e4b73ba091db41ee046f3.pdf

Sanchez-Munoz, A. (2019). Bilingualism in California: The Case of Los Angeles. In Biculturalism and Spanish in Contact: Sociolinguistic Case Studies (pp. 51–68). Taylor & Francis/Routledge.

Schroeder, S. R., Lam, T. Q., & Marian, V. (2017). Linguistic Predictors of Cultural Identification in Bilinguals. Applied linguistics, 38(4), 463–488. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amv049

Silva-Corvalan, C. (1986). Bilingualism and Language Change: The Extension of Estar in Los Angeles Spanish. Language, 62(3), 587–608. https://doi.org/10.2307/415479

bilingualism, bilinguals, cultural identity, Los Angeles, speech community

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Spanglish – The Art of Code-Switching

Bilingualism

Devan, Jessica Jary, Malia Salgado, Mao Mao, Valeria Carreon

In Hispanic neighborhoods, “Spanglish”— a linguistic practice that combines Spanish and English—has gained popularity as a way to communicate, even if some people do not realize that it involves code-switching. While the Chicanx and Latinx community is made up of people from a wide range of backgrounds, most of them are Spanish-English bilingual. In this research project, our group sought to investigate that when they are being interviewed, whether the Spanglish bilingual individuals would tend to code-switch, or rely heavily on one specific language while still understanding the other. We chose this research focus because we believe that studying the connection between the mixing of languages and the topic of conversation, as well as finding how often speakers code-switch, can help other Spanish-English bilingual speakers learn the semantics behind each individual code switch, thus breaking language barriers. We hypothesized that because of the participants’ daily reliance on both English and Spanish, code-switching via Spanglish would be prevalent in the interviews we conducted.

Methods

In order to test our hypothesis, we decided to interview five to ten individuals who are able to understand English and Spanish and speak both languages to varying degrees of fluency. Our interviews consisted of ten questions, five were asked in English and the other five were asked in Spanish. The participants were interviewed individually in various environments and locations, and through various methods including questionnaires, phone interviews, recorded disputes, and gossip interviews. The age range of our participants is from 18 to 55. All of them come from Mexican households and are either first or second-generation immigrants, but all described themselves as bilinguals and having spent the majority of their lives in the United States. Our younger interviewees have all lived in the United States for their entire lives and have learned Spanish from the older generations, whereas the older interviewees all immigrated to the United States in search of a better future, and they picked up English after their immigration. Nevertheless, our research is able to determine that members of this community code-switch and employ Spanish in their everyday lives, despite the fact that these participants come from very diverse origins. For the interviews that were specifically on ages 18-25, we noticed a more noticeable code-switching when answering the question. For our tables below we witness that younger interviewees felt more comfortable jumping in between languages. They use more words like “pues” “ósea” “si” “no”. Another example we can look at is this dialogue that was said during the interview by a 19-year-old.

Question: “What do you wanna be when you grow up?”

Answer : “ Social media marketing, algo asi”

Question: “What was your favorite childhood meal?”

Answer: “Rice and beans, revueltos?”

Question: “Cual es tu vacación ideal?”

Answer: “ Tropical area in a small town and like an ocean front house, view”

Question: “La mejor fiesta que haz tenido?”

Answer: “When I was eighteen”

Figure 1: Uses of Spanish, English, and Spanglish among interviewees

Whilst interviewing our older interviewees between the ages of 35-55, we noticed that these individuals tended to try to stick to speaking one language whilst answering the questions. 3 out of 4 of the interviewees in this category that we interviewed chose to answer all questions in English even though their native language is Spanish. As a result of Spanish being their dominant language whilst answering the 10 questions, these interviewees struggled quite a bit while trying to come up with English responses. Even though they were struggling, these 3 individuals stuck to answering in English even though they understood they could answer questions in Spanish, which we can see in the example below.

(During the beginning of an interview, she started speaking English and stated “My name is” before proceeding to tell me she would much rather speak en Español/ in Spanish. Additionally, she usually answered the questions I asked in English in the same language) :

First question

Question: What did you want to be when you grew up?

Answer: “Nurse”

Question: “Why did you want to be a nurse?”

Answer: “Because I like it. Take care of the kids.”

Second question

Answer: “Chile rellenos, rice, and beans”

Question: “Why do you like rice and beans? What do you like about them?”

Answer: “Because my mother show me how to make it when I was little kid.”

Third question

Answer: “My plan for tomorrow. Work. I have to work.”

Fourth question

Answer: “Aliens– That’s not real. I don’t believe in that.”

Fifth question

Answer: “Sunday– When i’m not working I go to the church with my sister sometime.”

Question: “Do you like going to church?”

Answer: “Yea”

With this, we concluded, and observed distinct dynamics in the nature of conversation for interviewees, which prompted us to make adjustments throughout the process. Notably, individuals aged 30 and above, primarily parents or older adults, approached the interviews with a more formal tone. They consistently responded in the language the question was initially posed, even if English presented some challenges for them. However, the interactions with friends and close family members, ranging from 18 to 25 years old, established a more relaxed atmosphere. This rise in comfort level led to much more frequent code-switching for the older adults, as they seamlessly shifted between the two languages. Recognizing that a strict question-and-answer format might yield more formal responses, we decided to incorporate recorded conversations on various topics. Subsequently, our findings indicated that the frequency of code-switching was less influenced by the relationship dynamics and more by the nature of the conversation topic. This discovery led us to uncover numerous instances of code-switching in these recorded discussions.

Discussion and Conclusions

Overall, our research successfully validated our hypothesis through multiple avenues of investigation. Notably, we demonstrated that Spanish-English bilingual speakers transition between codes more often than they may think. Moreover, a pattern surfaced during our research: participants tended to match the language used in the responses in formal interviews that were organized around predetermined questions. Nevertheless, in more relaxed conversational contexts, this pattern did not continue. Instead, participants were able to switch between languages with ease in familiar settings, even mixing vocabulary from both linguistic domains. This highlights the profound interacting influence of Hispanic culture and American culture on the Spanglish bilingual speakers, and showcases the intricate dynamics of living with two languages daily. It further underscores the evolution of Spanglish as a unique linguistic bridge, allowing us to forge a connection between both languages. Moreover, it emphasizes the significant presence of the Spanglish-speaking community, providing a touching connection to their ancestral roots while fostering a sense of closeness to the newly found home.

bilinguals, Code-Switching, Spanglish

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Bilingual Investigation

Bilingualism

Hana Almony, Lauren Campsey, Hannah Her, Ariana Cheng, Madeline Flood

In everyday discourse, language is influential in how we speak and engage with others. Specifically, looking at bilingual native Spanish, second language English speakers was explored in this study because the question we sought to answer was does an individual’s native language have an influence on a second language? To investigate this question, we hypothesized that it indeed does, and the language that one speaks will impact responses to the same interview questions in both Spanish and English. In conducting this research, agents of socialization were considered because the participants were native Spanish speakers with English as a second language so interview questions were geared towards the significance of language in relation to identity and self-expression. Moreover, this relates to the idea of linguistic relativity as this shows that one’s particular language use is correlated with one’s perception and idea of reality. In this study, linguistic relativity was evident when analyzing bilingual female individual participants in which we found similarities and differences in responses of each respective language. The goal of this study is to inform about the effects of language use through the modality of bilingual speakers and how language choice through one’s thinking may connect to specific conversations and everyday discourse.

Introduction and Background

Have you ever thought about how the language you speak affects the way you view the world around you? By understanding how language functions within society we can have a greater understanding of how impactful linguistic practices can be. For our project we chose to view bilingualism and how modality can affect perception. More specifically, in the context of native Spanish speakers with English as their second language. To investigate this hypothesis we used points of reference from Claire Kramsch’s Language and Culture and Nick Riemer’s book called Routledge Handbook of Semantics. Riemer’s book is a collection of the works of many leading scholars and academics from around the world. Both Kramsch and Reimer provide an overview of entire linguistic subjects and sub-disciplines. We focused on chapters such as modality, participant roles, and linguistic relativity in order to gain meaning and conceptualization. We also read articles from the Linguistic Society of America such as “Language and Thought” and “Linguistics in Everyday Life” to gain a greater understanding of linguistic theories in order to apply them to our research. We looked specifically at linguistic relativity to answer our question on how language can influence perception and the way we think paired with bilingual studies to help analyze differences within Spanish-English speakers.

Methods

To gather our data, we were able to interview five female individuals in the UCLA community who are native speakers of Spanish and also learned English as a second language. The setup of the interview was semi-structured and in-person with audio-recording for each participant. Two separate interviews were conducted by a bilingual group member, consisting of the same set of 10 questions in English and Spanish. Questions varied from how being bilingual affects communication and expression and how they use it in their daily lives. We also had controls in our study to limit variability throughout the interviews. The controls are the same set of interview questions in both English and Spanish, one interviewer to maintain the same personality and comfortability throughout the interviews, the same gender combination of a female interviewer and female participant for similar interaction types, having the participants bilingual in those two languages only, and maintaining similar environment conditions (time of day, public, and approximate number of people around). After the audio files finished processing, each version was manually transcribed by each group member and compared to see any similarities or differences in results. We looked into various aspects of modality in bilingualism and how it affects conversations and word choice. In relation to our hypothesis, the comparison between each interview was very surprising.

Results and Analysis

Throughout our interviews, we found that there were many similarities and differences in the participants’ responses. Though we were expecting differences specifically between each participant’s English and Spanish answers, we learned that the language didn’t completely dictate how the participants expressed themselves. The responses in general in both Spanish and English were very similar, if not the same, in both languages. The participants also all agreed that they spoke with an accent in English and Spanish, reflecting the influence on each language. The participants’ linguistic identities have pieces of English and Spanish – they are aware of their link to each of these languages and cultures, creating a consciousness in their pronunciations. We also noticed that when answering questions in Spanish, there were more pauses – these pauses did not have a specific pattern and differed between the participants, indicating that this has to do with their thought process in word choice. The participants shared that they mainly spoke Spanish with their family members and occasionally with friends depending on the environment. This language-specific context shows that they associate their linguistic identity with English for most of their communication, hence the pausing had more to do with comfortability with the language than for cultural reasons. Another way the interviews differed was the length and detail within answers in Spanish compared to English. According to Reimer (2016), a language can influence what or how much information is shared by the speaker. This was apparent when analyzing the different answers for each language. The English responses were more engaging and personal compared to in Spanish, signifying a linguistic influence over word choice and sentence length.

Figure 1: Sample responses in English and Spanish for the interview question “Happiness to me is …”

Figure 2: Sample responses in English and Spanish for the interview question “When did you start speaking Spanish and when did you start learning English?”

The examples above show the main findings of our study. Figure 1 highlights our last interview question, “Happiness to me is …” All of the participants’ answers had to do with love for someone – in this example, family. This depicts how the answer to this particular question was the same in both languages, reflecting that the individual shares the same values and thoughts in both languages. The lack of detail was prominent in many other questions as seen in Figure 2, asking the question, “When did you start speaking Spanish and when did you start learning English?” Though the general answer was similar, the participant went into more detail about their childhood when answering in English. The concept of linguistic relativity, though not in the traditional sense, was prominent in our study – the participants were all L2-English Native Spanish speakers and through their answers, we can see how, outside of family, English is the more spoken language, creating a sense of normalcy and identity within the English language.

Discussion and Conclusions

Within a conversation, the particular language an individual is speaking in can influence how they express themselves and this can largely be attributed to how culture and language are so intertwined (Kramsch, 2014). With this connection in mind, we hypothesized that L2-English Native Spanish speakers will have different responses to the same questions depending on the language that they are speaking in. Though our assumption was that there would be vastly different responses, in reality, the degree of the linguistic relativity of the responses was not as high as anticipated. The data revealed that participants had very similar responses in both languages, but the Spanish responses were shorter and less detailed than the English responses. We observed agents of socialization when analyzing our interviews as L2-English Native Spanish speakers had a deeper connection to their family structure. We learned that these specific participants have mainly tied Spanish to family members and situations. The connection between language and their background creates strong cultural bonds within the community. There were limitations in our study that may have contributed to our results. There were a total of five participants. This is a relatively small sample size. If a similar experiment were to be done in the future, the results would be more accurate with a larger sample size for a greater range in human variability to produce a more precise conclusion. These participants, though native Spanish speakers, have grown up and lived in the United States for a majority of their lives – we did not take into consideration the role of cultural assimilation, reflecting the likelihood that their answers in both languages would be very similar. This raises the question of how the participants relate to Spanish. The results of our study have taught us the role of language in our thought process and communication and the importance of being more aware and mindful in our everyday interactions as our language choice can contribute to how others feel in the conversation.

References

Aneta Pavlenko, Blackledge, A., Piller, I., & Teutsch-Dwyer, M. (2001). Multilingualism, Second Language Learning, and Gender. Berlin, New York De Gruyter Mouton.

Becker, K. R. (1997). Spanish/English Bilingual Codeswitching: A Syncretic Model. Bilingual Review / La Revista Bilingüe, 22(1), 3–30. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25745367

Bohman, T. M., Bedore, L. M., Peña, E. D., Mendez-Perez, A., & Gillam, R. B. (2010). What you hear and what you say: language performance in Spanish–English bilinguals.

International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13(3), 325–344. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050903342019

Comrie, B. (2012). Language and Thought | Linguistic Society of America. Linguisticsociety.org. https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/language-and-thought

Jacqueline Toribio, Almeida. “Code‐Switching among us latinos.” The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics, 4 Feb. 2011, pp. 530–552, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444393446.ch25.

Jesús-Ortiz, E., & Calvo-Ferrer, J. R. (2023, November 25). His or Her? Errors in Possessive Determiners Made by L2-English Native Spanish Speakers. Languages, 8(4), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8040278

Kanno, Y. (2003). Negotiating bilingual and bicultural identities: Japanese returnees betwixt two worlds. L. Erlbaum.

Kramsch, C. (2014). Language and Culture. AILA Review, 27(1), 30–55. https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.27.02kra

Linguistics in Everyday Life | Linguistic Society of America. (n.d.). Www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved March 16, 2024, from https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/linguistics-everyday-life#Domain

Niño-MurciaM. (2009). Bilingualism and identity: Spanish at the crossroads with other languages. Benjamins.

Ramírez, D. (2003). L1 regression in Spanish-English bilinguals. In Selected proceedings of the first workshop on Spanish sociolinguistics (pp. 89-95). Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

Riemer, N. (2019). The Routledge handbook of semantics. Milton Park, Abingdon New York, Ny Routledge.

Slobin, D. (1996). Social interaction, Social Context, and Language. Psychology Press.

bilingualism, bilinguals, identity, linguistic identity, modality linguistic relativity

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Fluency Ideologies Amongst Undergraduate Bi- and Multilinguals

Bilingualism

Kendall Vanderwouw, Rachel Liu, Julia Tran, Nessa Laxamana, Thalia Rothman

UCLA is an incredibly diverse institution, with over 5,000 international students and 100 nations being represented. It is no surprise, then, that they boast a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds. From this wealth of information, we sought to explore fluency ideologies amongst bi- and multilingual undergraduates, aged 18 to 22. Through this course and personal experiences, it’s become evident that the definition of fluency is in constant flux. A largely self-defined term, fluency could encompass everything from native-level repertoire to conversational proficiency. Thus, we aimed to investigate whether linguistic background impacted self-perception of fluency.

We engaged in semi-structured interviews with 30 undergraduates to explore this phenomenon and its implications amongst different languages. As we dove deeper, however, we observed little variation in how different languages defined fluency. Rather, most participants revealed similar definitions, centering around, “the ability to express feelings and complex ideas.” Instead, participants expressed a positive relationship between self-perceived fluency and a sense of familial or cultural connection. This finding and others ultimately led us to a new research question that targeted whether an individual’s fluency in a language, upbringing, environment, and cultural background can influence linguistic identity.

Introduction and Background

Our research began with questions regarding linguistic identity and fluency. Why do definitions of fluency fluctuate? Are definitions of fluency influenced by our linguistic backgrounds? What is the role of fluency in our cultural lives? Our participant pool represented a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds with which to answer these questions. This unique context provided a near-direct perspective into the context of language acquisition since many students had recently left backgrounds of language learning or were still in proximity to them, such as high school and familial environments.

We examined these curiosities through a series of interviews, taking an ethnographic approach to gain a more holistic understanding of the perspectives of our participants. After consolidating interview data, our research focus pivoted in a slightly different direction, one that looked at how a variety of factors—including fluency—can influence one’s linguistic identity. Our central research question was finalized as such:

Does an individual’s fluency in a language, upbringing, environment, and cultural background influence their linguistic identity?

Overall, our project ultimately represented a variety of linguistic backgrounds and cultural identities, with 18 languages spoken by 30 different speakers. This is visually represented in Figure 1, created by one of our group members to illustrate the linguistic diversity of our participants.

Figure 1: Tran, J. (2024). A map illustrating the linguistic and cultural spread of our participants

To garner a more in-depth understanding of our topic and to examine the current state of research, we engaged with readings regarding fluency ideologies as well as bi- and multi-lingual experiences. Such research provided context that informed our later analyses and conclusions.

For example, we found in several articles (Zubrzycki 2019; King 2013) that self-perceived fluency had the potential to give rise to shame or embarrassment in being unable to match the proficiency of others who may be exhibiting native-level fluency. Such ideologies create the daunting expectation that fluency necessitates a native-level mastery of a language. In addition to these academic sources, we found similar ideologies being proliferated through less formal means, such as YouTube videos. One video from Ted-Ed discussed the benefits of bilingualism to our brains, and in doing so put forth the concept of a “balanced bilingual,” which they describe as an individual who has equal proficiency in their languages. The video puts this idea forth, however, in order to make the point that the majority of bi- and multi-lingual speakers use their languages in different proportions and in varying scenarios. We found that videos such as this help to contribute towards a less stringent narrative of fluency that could lessen the shame caused by self-comparison to native speakers.

Figure 2; Ted-Ed. (2015). A screenshot from the Ted-Ed video discussing bilingualism and how it may affect an individual’s brain.

This left our group wondering whether such ideologies would be found amongst our participants, and what factors would lead to the formation of the expectation to be natively fluent. Overall, these initial investigations revealed to us that there are certainly links between linguistic identity and fluency self-perception. Our goal through this project was to contribute to this existing pool of knowledge and to provide a voice for our participants to express their unique ideologies.

Methods

Using semi-structured interviews, comprising of 12 standardized questions, we decided to take an ethnographic approach to our data collection. Through this process, we searched for self-perceptions of fluency, past language acquisition environments, as well as any current language ideologies regarding themselves. This methodology was deliberately chosen in order to produce consistent, qualitative data while also providing room for our participants to elaborate upon concepts and topics of their choosing. When permission was granted, we recorded the interviews for the purpose of deeper analysis as well as direct quoting in our project. Our participant pool were undergraduate college students, aged 18 to 22 years old.

Some of the questions that we asked were as follows: “In what circumstances / how often do you use this (these) language(s)?”, “How do you define being “fluent” in a language?”, and “Was it important to your parents/community that you were fluent in this language? What about you?”

Results and Analysis

Our data provided us with different viewpoints and ideologies regarding bilingualism and multilingualism. However, 60% of our participants defined fluency as the ability to express feelings and complex ideas, beyond the introductory phase in the language they speak. Some participants were more descriptive, stating that the ability to speak about specific things, such as the country’s government system, or even cultural idioms or slang. Some were less specific, stating that if you can get by in daily scenarios, you are fluent.

Figure 3; Laxamana, Nessa. (2024). A graphic showcasing how our participants defined fluency.

We also were able to discover different values that our participants held knowing their other language(s). 77% of our participants stated that they used their language to communicate with their family members, which is why they were able to become fluent in their language. This shows that language serves as a communication between different generations of people, for example between grandkids and grandparents.

Figure 4; Laxamana, Nessa. (2024). A pie chart illustrating when and where our participants use their non-dominant languages.

We interviewed those born in and outside the U.S., and one interviewee stated that being fluent in that language makes them feel more connected to their culture as seen in EX. 1. However, the variation in answers slightly differed between those born in different countries and those born in the U.S. For those born outside the U.S., they stated that their fluency in the language was a way to connect them back home. For those born in the U.S., they stated that fluency in the language was influential in how connected to their culture/mother tongue.

Discussion and Conclusion

At the center of our research was an investigation into the factors that make up and influence linguistic identity. We ultimately align our definition of linguistic identity with a reading from our initial research (Dressler 2014, p. 43), which argues that “linguistic identity can be expressed in terms of expertise (i.e. linguistic competence), affiliation (formal or informal connections), or inheritance (familial connections).” None of these factors were considered to be mutually exclusive in our research. As previously exemplified, the linguistic identities of our participants were commonly observed to be in line with more than one of the pathways mentioned above. Most importantly, our research brought about more understanding of how people’s various reasons for their language fluency are intertwined largely with their understanding of culture and belonging. Language and communication with others are important to keeping cultures and traditions alive, it serves as a sense of cultural connection for most. With our findings, we discovered an insight into how language fluency, ideology, and culture intertwine with one another.

References

Dressler, R. (2015). Exploring Linguistic Identity in Young Multilingual Learners. TESL Canada Journal, 32 (1), 42. https://doi.org/10.18806/tesl.v32i1.1198

King, K. A. (2013). A Tale of Three Sisters: Language Ideologies, Identities, and Negotiations in a Bilingual, Transnational Family. International Multilingual Research Journal, 7(1), 49–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/19313152.2013.746800

Ted-Ed. (2015, June 23). The benefits of a bilingual brain – Mia Nacamulli [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMmOLN5zBLY

Zubrzycki, K. (2019). Am I perfect enough to be a true bilingual? Monolingual bias in the lay perception and self-perception of bi- and multilinguals . International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 57(4), 447-495. https://doi.org/10.1515/iral-2016-0095

bilingualism, college students, fluency, identity, International Students, linguistic identity, multilingualism

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Code Switching Across Generations in Bilingual Families

Bilingualism

Paulina Martirossian, Veronica Rojas, Itxhel Lozoya, Cambrya Melendez, Ashlyn Claustro

Have you ever wondered how code-switching and bilingualism can differ depending on the person you are communicating with? Do you feel that it can have an impact on relationships that are formed between people among different generations? This study explores how bilingual individuals across many generations who speak Armenian and English or Spanish and English may alter their approaches to communication when interacting with certain people. Additionally, we were curious to find out whether or not the closeness of people’s relationships affects their formality when communicating and code-switching. In order to find results, we conducted numerous semi-structured interviews and listened in on the conversations between college students and their relatives, while paying attention to word choice, syntax, and grammar when speaking. We concluded that (87%) of our interviewees believe that their relationship with their elders determines the formality of their communication style, often leading to difficulty when expressing oneself. By studying code-switching and bilingualism, we discovered a relationship between identity and communication that spans across generations.

Introduction and Background

Throughout our research, our target audience is the diaspora of bilingual individuals of a variety of age ranges, who speak either Spanish and English or Armenian and English. Our main goal is to focus on code-switching and the ways in which people of different generations communicate with one another. From our research, we sought to understand how students’ perspectives on being bilingual play a crucial role in understanding how speaking two languages can have an impact on their daily lives as they socialize with elders and people of their age. Prior to conducting any of our research, we hypothesized that Spanish and Armenian bilingual individuals would speak with more formality when with older family members and switch to speaking with less formality when with those whom they are closer to in age and relationship.

Methods

We looked at bilingual students who spoke English, and either Armenian or Spanish. We wanted to look at interactions between older and younger generations, so we focused on college students, as well as two parents with college children to have a contrasting perspective. Listening to phone calls allowed us to figure out which language was being used and when, although this method only allowed us to listen to one side of the conversation. We did this to see if there was a specific timing or reason that bilingual speakers switched the language being used. Another element we listened for in these phone calls was how formally college students were talking to those who were older than them. We determined formal speech by whether the speaker used slang, curses, or other language that would not be considered proper when speaking to the older generation. For Spanish speakers, the formal ‘usted’ was an indication of formal speech. After listening to phone calls, we also conducted interviews. The interview questions we used were open-ended and the same questions were used for all participants. We decided to use open-ended questions to allow freedom in responses. The questions asked can be found below, but all had to do with the participants’ thoughts on bilingualism as well as how they interact with those of the older generation.

Results and Analysis

Figure 1: Summary of interview questions and answers

Discussion and Conclusions

In conclusion, our research has provided us with valuable insights into the intricacies of code-switching among bilingual individuals within the Spanish-English and Armenian-English speaking diasporas. By focusing on intergenerational communication patterns, we have uncovered the significance of word choice and formality levels in interactions between different age groups. Our findings highlighted that the main influential factor for one’s word choice and formality of speaking was having respect for older individuals with whom they are communicating as such respect is a cultural facet. This evidence sheds light on the intricate connections between language, cultural norms, and social relationships, showing how language use is shaped by both internal and external environmental factors. Overall, our research has given us an extensive and comprehensive understanding of the nuanced ways in which bilingual individuals communicate in various social situations.

References

Babino, A., & Stewart, M. A. (2017). “I Like English Better”: Latino Dual Language Students’ Investment in Spanish, English, and Bilingualism. Journal of Latinos and Education, 16(1), 18–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348431.2016.1179186

Heredia, R. R., & Altarriba, J. (2001). Bilingual Language Mixing: Why Do Bilinguals Code-Switch? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10(5), 164–168. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20182730

Hua, Z. (2008). Duelling Languages, Duelling Values: Codeswitching in bilingual intergenerational conflict talk in diasporic families. Journal of Pragmatics, 40(10), 1799–1816. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2008.02.007

Mata, R. “Bilingualism Is Good but Codeswitching Is Bad: Attitudes about Spanish in Contact with English in the Tijuana – San Diego Border Area.” Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, vol. 20, no. 4, 2023, pp. 386–407, https://doi.org/10.1080/15427587.2022.2136672.

Meisel, J. M. (1994). CODE-SWITCHING IN YOUNG BILINGUAL CHILDREN: The Acquisition of Grammatical Constraints. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 16(4), 413–439. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44487780

Additional Sources

Mia Nacamulli: The benefits of a bilingual brain | TED Talk: This video discusses the benefits of being bilingual while putting into perspective individuals that navigate the world through two different cultures.

Code Switching in Bilingual Development: a video showing examples of children coded-switching to give readers an audio/visual representation of what code-switching is

bilingualism, Code-Switching, familial communication, formality

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Is Instagram the New Duolingo? Investigating How Social Media Usage Affects Heritage Language Competence

Bilingualism

Sarah Bassiry (Sky), Anna Harutyunyan, Akina Nishi, Jasmine Shao

Diaspora communities and heritage language speakers are a very unique population when it comes to language and bilingualism. Heritage speakers vary greatly in their language skills, language background, and environment. As heritage speakers are generally exposed to their heritage language only at home or in other limited contexts such as a cultural community group, this study investigated to see if social media may also be a context of heritage language exposure for some heritage speakers. If so, this study investigates the role social media might play in language competence. Four Eastern Armenian and four Mandarin heritage speakers attending UCLA and one native speaker in each language, were participants in this study. The participants were given a language background survey, a grammaticality judgment test, and an elicitation task judged by a dominant native speaker using a Likert scale. Initially, we expected to see a positive correlation between social media usage in the heritage language and the participants’ heritage language skills. However, the results did not provide sufficient evidence to support this hypothesis. Thus, further testing with a larger sample size is recommended to further investigate whether or not there might be a correlation.

Introduction and Background

The concept of bilingualism is interesting to discuss in the context of heritage speaker populations, as these groups include speakers of a vast variety of language competence. Heritage language speakers ‘may or may not be frequent users of the language or exceptionally proficient in the language” (Mahootian, 2000). Many heritage speakers are also receptive bilinguals, which Nakamura (2019) notes, “does not imply zero production of the weaker language but highly limited language use in interaction.” These speakers usually have strong listening and comprehension skills but weaker production skills in their heritage language.

This study sets out to determine if there is a correlation between heritage speakers’ social media consumption in their heritage language and their competence in that language. A prior study on bilinguals and newspaper consumption conducted by Moring (2011) et al., found media to be an instrumental resource in maintaining language competence. Flewitt and Zhao (2020) also conducted a study investigating the relationship between heritage speakers and social media usage. In their study, they observed two adolescent Mandarin Chinese heritage speakers and their usage of WeChat to connect with relatives in the heritage language. They found that WeChat acted as a “springboard to include multilingual practices” and facilitated a motivating environment of supportive feedback from interlocutors for their language to grow.

Given the previous research in the field, we hypothesized that our study would show that more frequent social media consumption in the heritage language will be correlated with a higher degree of language competence. Previous studies have noted that in the case of young children, engagement with social media often involves “several types of learning and socialization occurring all at once” (Zhao, 2019). In this study, we aimed to observe the role social media activity plays in the heritage language competence of young adults at UCLA.

Methods

The population this study investigated was heritage speakers of either Mandarin or Eastern Armenian who attend UCLA, testing 4 participants for each language. This project utilized survey methods, grammaticality judgment tasks, and elicitation tasks to investigate the research questions.

Our general survey asked participants basic questions regarding demographics, social media usage in the heritage language, and information regarding details of heritage language background and exposure. Two separate grammaticality judgment tests with 20 questions each were created by bilingual speakers of each language from the research team. The Eastern Armenian task tested plural suffixation and word order, the morphosyntactic structure of the language. The Mandarin task tested participants’ knowledge of aspect markers and measured words. We chose to test structures that differ from English, which are commonly lost by heritage speakers. They also included romanization and audio recordings of the tasks to account for the varying degrees of literacy.

The elicitation tasks consisted of a story-retelling exercise where the participants were virtually shown an animated short story from Youtube in the heritage language and then asked to retell the story in the heritage language. A Likert scale was then used by a native speaker to judge each participant’s fluency levels as they viewed the recording of the participant’s elicitation.

Results

The participants in the study varied in the production and comprehension levels of their respective heritage languages, and their use of social media in the heritage language.

Eastern Armenian heritage speakers varied in their production and comprehension levels of the language. Based on the results of the elicitation and grammaticality tasks, it appears that receptive knowledge is not necessarily related to expressive knowledge. For instance, the native speaker ranked participants B2 and B3 as the lowest proficient speakers of the heritage language, but these same participants had two of the highest scores for correctly identifying grammaticality judgments in their heritage language.

Figure 2. Grammaticality & Elicitation Tasks Results (Eastern Armenian).
Figure above shows that participants had varying results on the grammaticality judgment tasks and the elicitation task. Only B4 has high scores on both tasks.

Additionally, the Eastern Armenian heritage speakers who score the highest on the elicitation and grammaticality judgment tasks consumed social media in various amounts, ranging from rarely or never to as frequent as daily consumption. Participants B2 and B3 scored the highest on the grammaticality judgment tasks, but B3 said that they rarely or never consume social media in their heritage language, while participant B2 did so on a daily basis, in formats of video, audio, and text. Participant B4 scored highest on the elicitation task and the second highest on the grammaticality judgment tasks, and used social media in the form of Instagram video multiple times a month. Lastly, participant B1 scored the lowest on the elicitation task and had a somewhat low score on the grammaticality judgment task. They consume social media in their heritage language on a weekly basis in the form of audio and text.

All in all, the data from our Eastern Armenian speakers does not represent any correlation between social media usage and heritage language competence.

Figure 3. Self-Evaluated Language Interaction Survey Results (Mandarin).
Figure above shows that more than half of the participants received formal education in Mandarin and only a quarter of the participants use social media in Mandarin.

Our Mandarin heritage speaker participants also varied in their levels of fluency. Diverging from the lack of relationship we observed in Armenian, those who performed highly on one test usually performed highly on the other. Only one of our four participants for Mandarin, participant A2, expressed consumption of social media in Mandarin, and this participant also had the highest score on the grammaticality judgment tasks. This speaker could serve as one data point to support our hypothesis that heritage language social media consumption is correlated to higher levels of retention in the heritage language. However, participant A4 scored second highest on both tasks, but they do not consume social media in Mandarin. Participants A1 and A3 also do not consume social media in their heritage language and received lower scores on both tests. Although the rough possibility of a correlation exists in the Mandarin data set, there is not enough evidence to definitively support our hypothesis.

Figure 4. Grammaticality & Elicitation Tasks Results (Mandarin).
Figure above shows that participants had varying results on the grammaticality judgment tasks and the elicitation task. Only A2 has high scores on both tasks.

Discussion and Conclusion

As a result of our investigation, we were unable to find supporting evidence for our initial hypothesis that higher social media consumption in the heritage language corresponds with higher competency in the heritage language. Some factors that led to this conclusion is the lack of concrete and frequent social media usage among the participants. For instance, in the Mandarin heritage speakers cohort, participant A2 claimed they use social media and received the highest scores on both tasks as seen in Figure 4, however, participant A4 who claimed they don’t use social media got the second-highest scores in the task. Similarly, in the Armenian heritage speaker cohort, participants B2 and B3 received similar results in both tasks (Figure 2) and the two highest on the grammaticality judgment task. However, participant B3 claimed they use social media never/rarely, while participant B2 uses social media on a daily basis. The contrast can be thought of to be due to formal instruction in the heritage language.

Our new finding, formal education, correlated with higher scores on both tasks. For instance, participants B2, B3, and B4 received formal instruction in learning Eastern Armenian. The Mandarin heritage speaker who performed the highest on both tasks, A4, also received formal education in Mandarin. This correlation was of interest for other scholars who claim that the lack of formal education has negative effects on the acquisition of the heritage language; children who don’t receive formal education do not learn the formal registers, vocabulary, and complex structures in written language (Montrul, 2010). Our data reflects the aforementioned claim as the participants who did not receive formal instruction in Eastern Armenian and Mandarin performed the lowest or second lowest on the grammaticality judgment task which tests their knowledge of the language grammar. While formal education can be a factor that influences higher competency in the heritage language, this correlation has to be interpreted in terms of production or grammatical knowledge. This is because the participants who received formal education performed well on the grammaticality judgment task, but not as well on the elicitation task. These results show that analysis between formal education and heritage language competency should be further investigated.

Another factor that can influence the participant’s competence in the heritage language is the age of exposure. There is contrasting data on how the age of exposure relates to language competence. Proponents of the Critical Period Hypothesis claim that children should be exposed to a language at a certain age to be able to acquire it native-like (Mahootian, 2020). Others claim that other factors such as ‘the child’s temperament or motivation’ can affect their learning of a language (Yuldasheva, 2021). In our research, we found that 7 out of the 8 participants in our study claimed that they were exposed to their heritage language from 0 to 3 years old, with one exception, A4, who claimed they were exposed to their heritage language from 4 to 8 years old. In addition, more than half of the participants, 5 out of 8, claimed that they were exposed to both English and the heritage language at the age of 0-3, simultaneously. The participant who performed the best on both tasks in Mandarin claimed to have been exposed to English and Mandarin simultaneously from the age of 0-3. The participant who performed the best on both tasks in Eastern Armenian stated that they were exposed to English from the age of 4-8 and Armenian, from the age of 0-3. This shows that age of exposure may not play a major role in the heritage speaker’s language competency. Perhaps, the difference lies in simultaneous and sequential bilingualism. Age of exposure to the heritage language may be a sufficient factor in the heritage language competency, however, this factor has to be accompanied by other factors, perhaps, social media consumption and formal education in the heritage language.

Another finding is that there may be a correlation between longer attendance to formal instruction and higher social media usage. Social media in the heritage language provides an extension to the traditional classroom setting. Going back to Zhao & Flewitt’s case study, heritage language speakers’ language practices on WeChat extended their “Chinese-speaking social world and provided them with opportunities to engage in contextualized, transnational heritage language and literacy practices beyond their home and Saturday Chinese school environment.” (Zhao & Flewitt, 2020). We could make the claim that formal instruction and social media in the heritage language complement one another to learn, and a longer history of instruction may motivate the bilingual speaker to seek more natural and conversation-based learning environments, such as social media.

Overall, claiming that the heritage speakers’ competency in the heritage language correlates with their social media consumption would be invalid based on the findings of our research. Other variables that can account for this contrast are formal education in the heritage language or age of exposure to the language. Perhaps, formal education in the heritage language could account for these three heritage speakers’ higher performance on the grammaticality judgment and in one of the cases, the elicitation task. In a similar manner, the age of exposure to the language can be a variable that influences the results. A detailed analysis above shows that these are sufficient factors of heritage language competency and the limitations of our study prevent further research into these variables. Some of the limitations of our study include a smaller sample size. With a larger sample size, the findings of our research could be more reliable and generalizable.

However, it was interesting to see a small sample size showcase such a wide variety of language proficiency. Bilingual heritage speakers have unique backgrounds in their heritage language because of many internal and external factors, such as “the role of the school system and other institutions, the historical experiences of particular language communities, the unique circumstances involved in the adoption by some communities or individuals of proxy HLs as part of the complex multiple identities of contemporary life, and the specifiable impact of a language ecological pattern over the life cycle of individuals and families” (Lo Blanco, 2001). Our participants had different characteristics, such as high proficiency in listening but lower proficiency in writing, or vice versa, as well as the amount of formal education, ranging from a couple of years to over 10 years.

For future research, if these methods are adapted, we suggest that elicitation tasks are performed in an in-person setting rather than virtual, where the native speaker listens to the heritage speaker’s elicitation and rates them in person. Additionally, the elicitation tasks should be reviewed by different native speakers. We believe that these changes will allow the results to be more reliable and generalizable.

References

Lo Bianco, J. (2001). Language Policies: State Texts For Silencing and Giving Voice. Difference, Silence and Textual Practice: Studies in Critical Literacy, 31-71.

Mahootian, S. (2019). Bilingualism. Routledge.

Montrul, S. (2010). Current issues in heritage language acquisition. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 30, 3-23.

Moring, T., Husband, C., Lojander-Visapää, C., Vincze, L., Fomina, J., & Mänty, N. N. (2011). Media use and Ethnolinguistic Vitality in bilingual communities. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 32(2), 169–186. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2010.541918

Nakamura, J. (2019). Receptive bilingual children’s use of language in interaction. Studies in Language Sciences, 18, 46-66.

Yuldasheva, D. (2021). Age and The Second Language Acquisition. Research Jet Journal of Analysis and Inventions, 2(04), 124-130.

Zhao, S. (2019). Social media, video data and heritage language learning. In G. Falloon, J. Rowsell, & N. Kucirkova (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of Learning with Technology in Early Childhood. Routledge.

Zhao, S., & Flewitt, R. (2020). Young Chinese immigrant children’s language and literacy practices on social media: a translanguaging perspective. Language and Education, 34(3), 267–285. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1656738.

heritage speakers, language proficiency, social media

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Impassioned Speech: ¿Lo has visto?

Bilingualism

Nikki Lee, Kiara Mares, Jamie Seals, Ally Shirman

In everyday conversations, bilingual speakers frequently code-switch between their languages. With our modern society, we can see this becoming prevalent in media during emotional scenes with bilingual characters; specifically in movies and TV shows. In this study, we investigated three different shows and movies with bilingual actors who use their heritage language as a part of their character to see whether there is a correlation with code-switching in highly emotional situations. We chose three sources to gather this data that have at least one bilingual main character; Jane the Virgin (2014), Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), and Modern Family (2009). For each source, we analyzed around 120 minutes to have an equal amount of data. Analysis of this data found that code-switching during emotional scenes did occur, but was more prevalent in more recent media. The study helps to show that code-switching is becoming more representative for bilingual speakers in modern media.

Introduction and Background

Entertainment media heavily relies on creating a connection between the viewers and the characters and themes presented. The characters in media are often the biggest attraction because of their relatability. Thus, the representation of characters with different backgrounds, including gender, ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status, etc. is very powerful in shaping viewer and societal perceptions. Characters rely heavily on language and emotion to give away key details and shape who they are and what their role is. This is especially evident in American entertainment media with actors who play ethnic characters, with cultures other than dominant U.S. culture. Bilingualism and code-switching are some of the biggest tools used to portray identity within these characters’ roles. This makes their heritage language use very strategic and intentional for character depiction. Recognizing the power of media and how it aims to reflect real-life ideas, our project focuses on where entertainment media uses second languages, and how it intersects with emotion to reflect ideas about a language or a character.

Our project focuses specifically on bilingual actors within entertainment media who use their heritage language as part of their character. We want to investigate when this heritage language is used and if it is associated with highly emotional scenes or situations. Research on language and emotion in real-life scenarios has indicated that language use and choice can be influenced by emotions that we correlate with that language. Looking specifically at American media, our goal is to observe whether or not heritage language use occurs in more emotional situations than non-emotional scenes, and identify if there are emotions that occur more often in a heritage or dominant language. This project will be focusing on language contexts, both positive and negative, and then observing what language it occurs in. Based on our own experiences with code-mixing, media depictions, and language perceptions, we hypothesize that in highly emotional situations, characters will code-switch to their heritage language, other than English. We predict that the characters are written to represent real-life bilingual speakers to deepen their character and the media. Many viewers may find this relatable or can connect with the cultural identity of both languages being presented – which could contribute to further media representations.

Gaps in Research

Though bilingual speakers often use one language in specific settings, and the other in other settings (e.g. heritage language at home and in informal contexts, and dominant language in formal settings like work, especially if that second language is the standard language of their country), they also often use both languages at once (Ferguson, 1959). This most commonly happens when speaking to other bilingual people, but it does happen elsewhere as well. This use of both languages at once is referred to most commonly as code-switching, where interlocutors will use both languages at their disposal within the same utterances, often without consciously making the decision to do so. Though there are many ways and uses of communicating via multiple languages at once, a prominent trigger for code-switching comes from emotionally arousing situations. One study found that, through direct observation of participants in a high-stress problem-solving task, people code-switched more frequently when expressing negative emotions. Specifically, participants switched to their heritage language to express these negative feelings rather than using the dominant language (Williams, Srinivasan, Liu, Lee, Zhou, 2020). We anticipate that our study will recognize some of the same characteristics of code-switching and plan to focus on a character, then identify the number of situations in which this occurs.

Additionally, in these highly arousing emotional situations, it is more likely that speakers use their first language to react, rather than their second language. We see this in the study conducted by Ariana Mohammadi titled, “Swearing in a second language: the role of emotions and perceptions.” Additionally, a study conducted by Shahrzad Mahootian covers these emotional situations in their study and they state, …the list of evocative switches was “more meaningful” in Spanish, that they carried “more emotional power,” (“emotional statements will be said in Spanish. English is not sufficient”) that they were used to “create solidarity,” that they were “much stronger” when said in Spanish (Mahootian 2005). This study helps to show how speakers would be more motivated to code-switch in order to convey their words more effectively between themselves and their listeners. As we have shown, there has been a good amount of research done on the connections between code-switching and heritage language use with emotion but this research has not been carried over to the media. There has not been research done specifically on character use of code-switching and heritage language use and the emotion of their character or scene. We hope to fill this gap with our research in this project and we can anticipate that the media we have chosen for our study will be able to reflect these previous findings.

Methods

To understand whether code-switching occurs in half or more emotional instances in media, we used three sources that each include at least one bilingual main character and are from the 21st century. Specifically, Jane the Virgin (2014), Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), and Modern Family (2009).

From left to right: *Jane the Virgin (2014), Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), Modern Family (2009)*

Additionally, we made sure that all three of these sources’ bilingual characters’ heritage languages were relevant to the characters themselves, but not a dominant focus for the storylines. All bilingual characters were interacting in a space where their heritage language is not the dominant language (which is English in all three sources).

We analyzed roughly 120 minutes of each source to ensure that the amount of data we collected from each would be equal, based on the length of Everything Everywhere All at Once. (We looked at three Jane the Virgin episodes (each ~40 minutes), and 6 Modern Family episodes (each ~20 minutes)).

We noted (coded) each instance of an emotional scene in each source, as well as instances of code-switching within these emotional scenes. This would allow us to calculate a ratio (number of code-switching instances in emotional scenes divided by the total number of emotional scenes), and thus a percentage, to understand how accurate our hypothesis is.

Before coding each source, we defined what “emotional” meant to ensure that each researcher was coding via the same guidelines. Highly emotional instances could come in the form of:

Voice: raised voice, yelling, screaming, whimper
Exaggerated body language
Clearly emotional facial expressions that last (e.g. no microexpressions)
Crying

Results

Everything Everywhere All At Once

4 code-switching instances in 8 total emotional scenes → 50% code-switching

Jane the Virgin

15 code-switching instances in 35 total emotional scenes → 43% code-switching

Modern Family

8 code-switching instances in 47 total emotional scenes → 17% code-switching

Combined: 27/90 → 30% of all emotional scenes across the three sources included code-switching.

Everything Everywhere All At Once was the only source to meet the hypothesis that at least half of the emotional scenes would include code-switching. However, it is important to note that there was quite a bit of diversity in how many instances of emotional scenes there were per source. Everything Everywhere All At Once only included eight, likely because it has deep themes compared to the sitcom-like shows, and the scenes are generally longer. Modern Family, on the other hand, is fast-paced (only 20 minutes per episode) and includes generally more exaggerated characters, leading to their behaviors being more exaggerated and emotional as well. This is reflected in the 47 total emotional scenes, compared to the eight from the movie.

However, even though Modern Family had the most emotional scenes, it had the lowest ratio (17%) – this is likely because there is only one bilingual character (Gloria), giving her fewer opportunities and reasons to code-switch (e.g. code-switching out of instinct when stepping on a Lego, versus code-switching to communicate an idea to someone who also speaks English and Spanish that she wouldn’t otherwise be able to explain).

Visual Media

Patterns and Analysis

Results of our study did not exactly align with our data but did highlight some interesting patterns. There were three particular patterns that were recurring in the data and had a similar basis to previous research in the realm of bilingualism in the media.

The first pattern observed from our data was the use of bilingual code-switching for reference terms. In all three of the media forms, characters code-switched when referring to another character they were close to or comfortable with. In Jane the Virgin, this was observed with the consistent referral to Jane’s grandmother as “abuela,” even when the rest of the sentence was in English. ‘Gloria’ in Modern Family also did this frequently when referring to her husband with terms of endearment such as “mi amor” (season 9, episode 3) and when referring to Haley’s children as “mis niños” (season 11, episode 6). This pattern touched on previous research that found that heritage language is used when speakers are more comfortable, which would make sense for using with family (Cho, 2015).

Modern Family Phil makes Gloria cry

Another pattern observed was use of bilingual code-switching as a form of addressing certain audiences. During scenes where characters were in the presence of other bilingual characters, or when they wanted to speak to someone directly, sometimes to the extent of using language to be private. This example was seen in Everything Everywhere All At Once when ‘Evelyn’ is standing up to ‘Gong Gong’ and switches between languages to focus on different scenarios, despite him understanding each of the languages. Evelyn chooses to code switch from Cantonese, English, and finally Mandarin to allow the listeners of that scene, her daughter and husband, to better understand her feelings. Other scenes like in Jane the Virgin used code-switching to Spanish to make sure the police didn’t understand their plan of action while he was in the room. This pattern is reflective of previous research that concluded that negative languages are more typically expressed in the heritage language, which could explain why it was used to exclude someone from a conversation (Williams, Srinivasan, Liu, Lee, Zhou, 2020).

Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) – Evelyn Stands Up To Gong Gong | HD

Jane the Virgin used code-switching to Spanish

Finally, we observed bilingual code-switching as an indicator of urgency. Characters who were experiencing a sense of urgency and trying to communicate this hurry used code-switching to do so. This example can be seen in Everything Everywhere All At Once when Evelyn is dealing with multiple stressful situations while her family members are adding to that stress, which makes her frantic. The audience can see her emotions overflow as she code switches from Mandarin to English in order to fully express her frustration in that situation. Given that urgency could be related to other feelings, such as stress and desperation, this observation came closest with our hypothesis.

Despite the shows having different content matter, being different genres and having different amounts of bilingual characters (and thus different instances of code-switching), these were patterns that overlapped in at least two of the three media examples used. The patterns occurred in various examples throughout each of the shows and seemed to be consistent parts of the character and their role in the plot. Each of the patterns identified was relevant in various instances throughout the shows and highlighted some real-life uses for code–switching and bilingualism. Although it wasn’t what we were expecting, it definitely taught us a lot about what to expect for bilingualism in both media and everyday life.

Limitations

Within our study, there were some limitations that potentially contributed to the results being different than our predictions, but definitely impacted the process. In relation to content, our project primarily focused on three media examples. Had we used more than two shows and one film, our results may have had more range in code-switching and examples of bilingualism. Essentially, a wider range in media examples would have been more beneficial for getting a wider scope of media examples. This connects with the second limitation: variation within the media content examples. Modern Family definitely had more “feel-good,” positive moments which is different from Jane the Virgin which dealt with heavier themes and was more of a drama. While this variation was definitely better for maximizing examples of bilingual code-switching, the lack of consistent storylines and genres didn’t allow for the same amount of opportunities for code-switching during impassioned speech. Instead, the variation in content and storylines would have made code-switching more of a chance occurrence than a predictable feature.

Finally, perhaps the most impactful limitation in our research project was that most characters were the only bilingual characters in the show. This was specifically the case for Modern Family, where ‘Gloria’ was the only character who spoke Spanish and didn’t have any other main character to speak it with. In Jane the Virgin, even though ‘Jane’ and ‘Xiomara’ were Spanish-English bilinguals, they would respond in English and ‘Abuela’ was the only one who spoke Spanish the entire time. Each of these limitations could have contributed to the results and for future studies would be important to avoid.

Future Study

Considering the limitations previously mentioned and in collaboration with the patterns mentioned, a refined, future study would certainly involve a wider range of media for observation. For standardization purposes, it would be important for shows to be produced and based in the US, be from the same range of years (as in our example, the last two decades/the 21st century), and have the same amount of minutes watched, but this new study would focus on shows with more bilingual characters. Considering these elements and our previous interest in bilingualism and code-switching in the media, further research conducted could be based upon media that covers different backgrounds to be more inclusive towards the American audience. We can see a trend of this from big companies, like Disney, who have produced movies like Encanto and Turning Red. With this trend of inclusivity, there is a high possibility of representation for bilingual speakers in future media. In turn, this would allow for more possible studies to look into the instances of code-switching during emotional scenes.

Conclusion

This analysis of bilingualism in media is a good first step for better understanding how bilingual and multicultural people are represented through TV, specifically to American, English-dominant audiences. However, no broad conclusions can be drawn from this study alone; without a large sample size, we may have missed important themes and patterns on the representation of code-switching from real life, or the patterns that we did find may not appear to the same degree on a larger scale.

A larger sample size, both in terms of the amount of minutes analyzed for each source, and the amount of diverse sources chosen, should be used to create a clearer picture of how writers choose to represent bilingual characters’ language use in media.

Despite the limitations and potential to make this study broader, this introductory analysis still has shown how some patterns of code-switching (proven to be common via research studies mentioned earlier) in real life are accurately represented in media as well. As the representation of multicultural and multilingual people in the United States is being more and more encouraged in American media, the more we are actually seeing it. As in Everything Everywhere All At Once – the most recent, and most diverse, media source used in this study, it was the one source that did meet our hypothesis (50% code-switching in emotional scenes).

As screenwriters continue to portray a more accurate representation of the diversity in the United States, the more we should expect to see multi-language dialogue, filled with code-switching in these shows and movies. In future studies, a specific focus on the function of code-switching by bilingual characters, both in and out of emotional contexts, could give even more insight into how multilingual and multicultural people are represented in older media versus current media. Some examples of code-switching (and code-mixing) functions include keeping conversations private from others, raising the status of the agent who is speaking, making side comments or humorous remarks, emphasizing what is being said, or reiterating something (Gumperz, 1982). Taking this approach and categorizing the linguistic reasons for code-switching would be a great potential first step for understanding where United States media companies are at in terms of true representation of the diversity in this country.

References

Cho, G. (2015). “Perspectives vs. Reality of Heritage Language Development Voices from Second-Generation Korean-American High School Students.” https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1065385.pdf

Ferguson, C. A. (1959). “Diglossia” WORD, vol. 15, no. 2, pp 325-340., https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1959.11659702

Gumperz. (1982). Conversational code switching. Discourse Strategies, 59–99.

https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511611834.006

Lee, J. S. (2010, April 23). The Korean Language in America: The Role of Cultural Identity in Heritage Language Learning. Taylor & Francis Online. Retrieved February 5, 2023, from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07908310208666638

Mahootian, S. (2005). Linguistic change and social meaning: Codeswitching in the media. International Journal of Bilingualism, 9(3-4), 361-375.

Mohammadi, A. N. (2020). Swearing in a second language: the role of emotions and perceptions. Taylor and Francis Online. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01434632.2020.1755293

Williams A, Srinivasan M, Liu C, Lee P, Zhou Q. Why do bilinguals code-switch when emotional? Insights from immigrant parent-child interactions. Emotion. 2020 Aug;20(5):830-841. doi: 10.1037/emo0000568. Epub 2019 Mar 14. PMID: 30869940; PMCID: PMC6745004

bilingualism, Code-Switching, heritage speakers, Media

Impassioned Speech: ¿Lo has visto? Read Post »

El tema que hablamos de: Spanish Heritage Speakers and Language Maintenance in the U.S. and France

Bilingualism

Ashley Ghodsian, Madeleine Kostant, Maxime Guerra, E Perez

There are various classifications for bilingual speakers in the formal study of bilingualism. Among these are heritage speakers, who have acquired a minority language in the home prior to gaining dominance in their majority language of the society upon being exposed to it in the community and in school. This results in unbalanced bilingualism in detriment to the minority (or heritage) language, a process of grammatical loss or weakening known as attrition. The emphasis of this study is whether this attrition in the heritage language can be attributed to transfer from the majority language, or if it is due to general loss of input or other extralinguistic factors. In order to accomplish this task, this study analyzed a specific syntactic (or sentence structure) construction, prepositional relative clauses, in populations of English-dominant and French-dominant heritage speakers (“HSs”) of Spanish. We hypothesized that previously reported attrition in the grammars of English-dominant Spanish HSs was due to dominant language transfer from English and that French-dominant HSs would not exhibit this same attrition. We conducted both receptive judegment tasks and oral production tasks in order to test this phenomenon, and found evidence that seems to largely be in favor of our hypothesis. We conclude by commenting on the broader implications of our research on bilingualism and pedagogy, especially as it relates to heritage language maintenance.

Introduction / Background

This study aims to examine heritage speakers’ attrition through the lens of dominant language transfer by probing this question with two groups of HSs: English-dominant Spanish HSs and French-dominant Spanish HSs. To do so, we focus on the syntactic structures of prepositional relative clauses. Relative clauses (“RCs”) are clauses used to modify a noun (e.g., In The dress that Mary wore was very old, the clause that Mary wore is an RC that modifies the noun phrase the dress.).

Prepositional relative clauses, which are notable because they contain a prepositional object, have two possible realizations in a sentence. The first is preposition-stranding (“P-stranding”), which occurs when a preposition is “stranded” at the end of a relative clause (e.g., The track which they train on _ is slippery and dangerous). The second, pied-piping, occurs when the preposition and the wh-element move together to the front of the clause to form a relative clause (e.g., The track on which they train _ is slippery and dangerous). All three languages explored in this study—Spanish, French, and English—accept pied-piping constructions. Our central motivation behind choosing these three languages, however, stems from the fact that English accepts P-stranding, but it is ungrammatical in both Spanish and French. We will return to this cross-language split of grammaticality with P-stranding shortly.

Several previous studies on this topic have inspired our investigation and experimental design. Kim (2007) found that Korean HSs in the U.S. exhibited more attrition of a specific syntactic construction than their counterparts in China. Although this had to do with a different construction than P-stranding, the findings demonstrate language transfer in action, specifically because Korean and Chinese share the same grammatical setting with respect to the construction being tested, whereas English holds a different setting from the other two. This study has been the largest source of motivation for us to investigate dominant language transfer for other types of syntactic constructions.

Further research on P-stranding and Spanish heritage speakers inspired our experiment design, notably Depiante and Thompson (2013) and Pascual y Cabo and Soler (2015). Depiante and Thompson (2013) conducted acceptability judgement tasks with heritage Spanish-English bilinguals, asking their participants to judge pied-piping and P-stranding in various constructions, including relative clauses. They determined that Spanish HSs generally accepted P-stranding more than their Spanish-dominant counterparts. A follow-up study by Pascual y Cabo and Soler (2015) replicated the experiment and further found that the timing of English acquisition also had a notable effect on the rate at which the speakers accepted P-stranding. Both of these studies relied on receptive judgement tasks in which participants read sentences and evaluated their grammatical acceptability. Our study seeks to contribute to this conversation by combining oral production tasks alongside receptive tasks.

The other gap in research that we hope to fill has to do with testing the two different groups of heritage speakers that we are studying, as previously mentioned. Our research question is as follows: is the apparent attrition of Spanish heritage speakers’ grammar (i.e., the acceptance of preposition-stranding) due to a general loss of input or to transfer from the grammar of the dominant language? We are able to investigate this question largely because the three languages we are exploring have the same pattern as the three languages in the Kim study: P-stranding is grammatical in English but ungrammatical in Spanish and French. Therefore, if we find no difference between our English-dominant and French-dominant speakers, we would not be able to attribute any potential attrition to transfer from the dominant language. However, if we find that our English-dominant HSs accept and produce P-stranding at a higher rate than the French-dominant HSs—which is what we hypothesize for this study—we can make the claim that this is due to the fact that English accepts P-stranding and French does not, and therefore that attrition is due to dominant language transfer in the case of prepositional RCs.

Methods

We recruited six participants total; five Spanish-English bilinguals from the U.S., and one Spanish-French bilingual from France. All of the speakers were heritage speakers of Spanish, with ages ranging between 19-23 years old. After recruitment, participants completed our experiment in several stages. First, they completed the production task over Zoom, during which they were shown a presentation with clipart images and accompanying sentences, some of which were test sentences and some of which were fillers. Each test sentence contained a prepositional object, and participants were prompted to rephrase that sentence with a relative clause so that we could see where they placed the preposition. An example of one of these slides is shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. Example from the elicitation task in which participants are prompted with the first sentence (left), “The children talk about a classic movie,” and are then required to complete the second one (right), which asks “What is this? This is the classic film…” and results in the response “… about which the children talk” if participants use pied-piping or “…which the children talk about” if they use preposition-stranding.

After the production task, participants completed a “pre-survey” called the Bilingual Language Profile (BLP) (https://sites.la.utexas.edu/bilingual/), a tool that linguistics researchers use to determine the language exposure and dominance of bilingual speakers. The BLP contains 19 main questions, each with their own sub-questions, which probe participants’ language exposure, linguistic history, daily use, confidence in fluency, and linguistic identity. All of this data is then used to automatically generate a dominance score, which determines which of the two languages the participant is dominant in. We used the dominance score and our participants’ self-reported ages of exposure in order to ensure that all participants were heritage speakers.

After the BLP, participants completed a main survey (the receptive task) in which they ranked sentences with relative clauses with prepositions, in addition to filler sentences, on a scale of 1 to 5 based on how natural or unnatural they sounded according to their intuitions. Our test conditions were evenly divided between pied-piping and P-stranding sentences. An example of one of our test sentences is shown below in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Example from the receptive task where participants were asked to rate sentences on a scale of 1-5 based on how natural or unnatural they sounded. This sentence is a pied-piping example, and it reads: “The film about which they speak has won many awards.”

Results

We found that for both the elicitation and receptive tasks, the Spanish heritage speakers from the U.S. produced or accepted P-stranding at a higher average rate than the participant from France. It is important to note that we ended up having four (4) Spanish heritage speakers from the U.S. and one (1) from France. Initially, we had five (5) participants from the U.S., but one of them rated the aforementioned “good” (i.e., grammatically correct) control sentences in the acceptability judgment task too low; as such, we disregarded their data.

Figure 3 below presents the production task results. The U.S.-based Spanish heritage participants produced P-stranding constructions 50% of the time, compared to 0% of the time for the French participant. For example, each participant was given the prompt: “Los meseros trabajaban con una cocinera famosa. Esta es la cocinera famosa…” (‘The waiters worked with a famous cook. This is the famous cook…’) and asked to complete the sentence. Two out of four (50%) of the U.S. participants responded with “…que los meseros trabajaban con” (‘…whom the waiters worked with’), stranding the preposition “con” at the end of the phrase. In contrast, the French participant responded “…con que los meseros trabajaban” (‘…with whom the waiters worked’). Given that P-stranding is not grammatical in French or Spanish, these results are in line with our hypothesis, which predicts that the English-Spanish bilinguals would produce more P-stranding than their French-Spanish counterparts due to transfer from English grammar.

Figure 3. Average Production Results Across Speaker Groups: out of all opportunities to produce P-stranding (every relative clause with a preposition), the 4 U.S.-based speakers produced it 50% of the time whereas the participant from France did not produce it at all and produced pied-piping 100% of the time.

Figure 4 below presents the acceptability task results. As explained above, the participants were given a mix of P-stranding, pied piping, and grammatical and ungrammatical filler sentences in Spanish, and asked to rate their grammatical acceptability on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being the most acceptable). The U.S.-based Spanish heritage participants rated P-stranding constructions to be an average of 3.33, compared to 1.67 for the French participant. For example, when given the sentence “La serie que hablan de tiene críticas muy buenas” (‘The show which they talked about has really good reviews’), the Spanish-English bilingual speakers gave it an average acceptability rating of 4 compared to 2 for the Spanish-French bilingual speaker. These results align with our hypothesis, which predicts that the Spanish-English bilingual speakers would accept P-stranding more than the Spanish-French bilingual speaker due to transfer from English grammar.

Figure 4. Average Acceptability Ratings Across Speaker Groups: Spanish-English bilinguals judged P-stranding with an average rating of 3.33 out of 5 on an acceptability judgement scale and the Spanish-French bilingual judged P-stranding with an average rating of 1.67 out of 5.

Discussion

Our data from both the elicitation and acceptability judgement tasks provides evidence in favor of our hypothesis that attrition experienced by Spanish heritage speakers with respect to the production and judgement of prepositional relative clauses is due to grammar transfer from their dominant language. It is important to note that due to our small sample size, these results are just numerical comparisons of averages; we cannot assert statistical significance.

The asymmetry between our speaker groups (four (4) from the U.S. and only one (1) from France) is another significant limitation for this experiment. It was difficult to recruit Spanish heritage speakers from France given that we are based in the U.S. and considering the time constraints on our experiment. For example, one of our U.S.-based participants never produced P-stranding constructions in her elicitation task. If she had been our only participant from the U.S., our results would have shown no attrition in the production task for either speaker group. However, we are attributing this to her dominance score from the Bilingual Language Profile (see “Methods”), because she was the only participant whose score was slightly dominant in Spanish. The other three (3) Spanish-English bilingual speakers were dominant in English, and the Spanish-French bilingual speaker was dominant in French. Our hypothesis allows for these results because it attributes attrition to grammar transfer from one’s dominant language; therefore, a heritage speaker dominant in Spanish may not exhibit attrition to the same degree as one dominant in the majority language of their society.

Another potential limitation could be the fact that our French participant had been learning Spanish formally in school for most of his life, while none of the U.S.-based participants reported taking Spanish for more than a couple of years. Foreign language educator Dr. Kathleen Stein-Smith highlights the discrepancies in second-language education between the U.S. and European countries in her 2013 Ted Talk, “The U.S. foreign language deficit” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CZ7zu5Aeu0). She argues that educational institutions, businesses, and government-funded programs can help to promote foreign-language teaching at the societal level. While our French participant was a heritage speaker of Spanish (and therefore not learning Spanish as a “second” language), the fact that France has such a comparatively robust Spanish language curriculum was unavoidable and may have skewed our results. If a speaker is explicitly taught prescriptive grammatical rules—for example, not to strand prepositions—they are less likely to violate these rules than speakers with no formal education in a language they only acquired in the home.

Conclusion

This experiment allowed us to explore the source of grammatical attrition in Spanish heritage speakers in terms of producing and accepting prepositional relative clauses. We conducted an elicitation task and an acceptability judgement task for five (5) participants: four (4) Spanish heritage speakers from the U.S. and one (1) from France. We found that on average, the participants from the U.S. produced and accepted P-stranding constructions more than the participant from France. Given that English allows P-stranding and French and Spanish do not, these results provide evidence in favour of our hypothesis that grammatical attrition in heritage speakers is caused by transfer from the grammar of speakers’ dominant languages. In other words, our study suggests that the participants from the U.S. are allowing and producing P-stranding in Spanish because they are dominant in English, which allows P-stranding. These findings shed light on how and why heritage speakers experience grammatical attrition, and have pedagogical implications for reinforcing heritage speakers’ language maintenance in the classroom. Bilingual education advocate Aminah Ghanem sheds light on the importance of reforming the U.S. language education system in order to promote multilingualism in her 2019 Ted Talk, “Reforming Our Bilingual Education System” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvCUk9qJQmE). She highlights the positive effects of multilingualism in terms of celebrating diverse cultures, preventing language discrimination, and the marginalisation of heritage speakers. We hope that our study will contribute to this conversation and promote future research and educational policy decisions as they affect heritage bilinguals.

attrition, heritage speakers, multilingualism, P-stranding

El tema que hablamos de: Spanish Heritage Speakers and Language Maintenance in the U.S. and France Read Post »

The Generational Effects on Code-switching in Conversation Content and Word Choice

Bilingualism

Isabelle Sandbank, Leonardo Diaz-Garcia, Huiyu Liu, Taehwan Kim

This study investigates the variations in code-switching behaviors between undergraduate students and faculty members at UCLA, with an emphasis on the generational impacts on word choice and conversation content. It utilizes a mixed-methods approach that incorporates surveys and text analysis, and it reveals that while both professors and students code-switch, there are clear disparities in their patterns of when they do it. In particular, younger students regularly code-switch with abbreviated phrases or words, whereas senior faculty members and professors typically tend to use formal language. Additionally, it also reveals that the word and phrase choices used while code-switching differ between generations, with younger students selecting more colloquial language when talking about day-to-day affairs and older faculty members favoring more modern language use and more serious topics. These results have significant repercussions for comprehending how generational disparities influence language practices and social identities.

Introduction

UCLA is known for being a very multicultural and diverse university, according to the school’s website. Through its population, it represents 118 countries and is home to over 5,000 international students (UCLA Facts & Figures, 2023). Within this body are multilingual students, professors, and faculty, some of which have the ability to switch between two languages, or varieties, at once, also known as code-switching (CS) (Washington-Harmon, 2022). Code-switching, a widely used technique, enables multilingual speakers to jump between languages without losing the syntax or structure of the prior language. People often code-switch from one language, such as English, to another, like their home language, in order to identify with a specific social group or convey specific information. Through the categorization of code-switched words in text messages, we were able to distinguish linguistic variations in word choice between bilingual UCLA undergraduates and the older professors and faculty members of the university to show that age affects the content of CS.

Background

Code-switching (CS) is a common phenomenon in multilingual communities (Bhatti, 2018). It is often a useful communicative tactic for bilingual communities as they believe code-switching helps them express what they want to communicate more clearly, directly, and efficiently (Bahous, 2013). It’s interesting to see that many who code-switch do not realize it- most students who speak in a bilingual environment do not realize that they are infusing English terminology when using a non-English language, and it seems that audience, context, identity and the effectiveness of information transmission will make multilingual people code-switch (Sichyova, 2005). This isn’t from unawareness due to a young age, as a recent study shows that even teachers do not realize that they code-switch (Bahous, 2013). Although we are aware of code-switching among both professors and students, there is still a lack of research that examines the linguistic disparities between these two cohorts.

Changes in CS patterns are also inseparably linked to personal experience. The speaker will tend to change languages according to the conversational style of the person whom they’re talking to; they will move between obvious CS and non-obvious CS, indicating their position in the group (Ellison, 2021). According to the findings of the Ellison study, which looked at the patterns of code-switching between languages such as Hindi and English, it was found that people of different ages often have distinctive and unique methods when it comes to changing between languages.

Does this mean that students and professors differ in their word choice of code-switching as well? Although previous research has looked at code-switching situations, this is currently a new idea and one we would like to explore.

Methodology

The population includes two distinct school cohorts, comprising of undergraduate students and faculty members at UCLA, with different age groups and unique school identities. Yet, each has something in common: they are all bilinguals. The experiment was conducted by sending out surveys to the UCLA community and asking them to share conversation logs screenshots. In the survey, participants would be asked about their demographic (i.e. gender, age, and school identity), their awareness of code-switching, and the frequency of code-switching in different scenarios. Furthermore, the participants were requested to share their email addresses voluntarily to facilitate follow-up communication, enabling us to collect the screenshots of their conversation logs at the end of the survey.

We used the judgmental sampling method, which uses our knowledge to select the individuals or cases to be included in the sample based on the research question addressed. Judgmental sampling method is a method that targets a population and maximizes the benefits of the analysis (Jagero, 2011). This provided a direction for data collection for our project.

After collecting surveys and participants’ conversation logs, researchers translated, transcribed, and categorized their code-switched sentences and words before analyzing possible patterns of code-switching between our established age parties (undergraduate students and faculty/professors).

Acknowledging the potential for bias in our study prior to presenting our findings is vital. The text samples are more susceptible to bias compared to our surveys. This is because there is a possibility that certain participants may have selectively shared specific segments of their text conversation with us, and the screenshots of the conversations shared by students and teachers may only represent a subset of the entire conversation.

While we may use alternate techniques of data gathering in future research, we must emphasize that for this specific study, we must consider the chance that it may not be composed of all possible data. Privacy issues are in fact a delicate subject that cannot be ignored, but something we would’ve hoped to get around.

Results and Analysis

Our research revealed that undergraduate students had a proclivity to employ abbreviated phrases or words via code-switching more often than faculty, who were more inclined to incorporate formal language while code-switching. By comparing two sets of conversational logs between undergraduate students and faculty, we observed that the former demonstrated a higher rate of code-switching within the logs as well.

Figure 1: CS Text message in English (switching to Hindi) from undergraduate student to another Shaam ko: “right now”

Our analysis revealed that undergraduate students were more apt to partake in code-switching during informal conversations with close friends. We observed this phenomenon primarily through the use of nouns pertaining to daily life (e.g., lunch, cafe, and waitlist, see Figure 2). Moreover, these students tended to initiate sentences with shorter verbal phrases such as “I gonna” and “I am”, while also utilizing code-switching at the conclusion of a sentence when they wished to express a particular time frame, specifically denoting in English for requests to happen “right now” or “today” (see Figure 1).

Figure 2: CS Text message in Mandarin (switching to English) from undergraduate student to another

Figure 3: CS Text message in English (switching to Spanish) from faculty to another older adults

Figure 4: CS Text message in Russian (switching to English) from professor to another older adult

Faculty seem to talk most about modern issues such as technology or politics, but at times, even in simple conversations such as talking about what to eat for dinner, they may code-switch just to use the word “for” in their native language (see Figure 3). Prepositions were a common code-switched word in faculty conversations. Further screenshots provided by UCLA faculty revealed a preference for proper nouns and more formal terms, such as “Kindle,” “verification,” and “email” (see Figure 4). Our data demonstrated that undergraduate students code-switched more often than faculty members when communicating through text messaging, or at times, more common to professors, email.

As stated so far, we’ve found code-switched words to fall into similar categories, such as prepositions, technological terms, legal jargon, or classroom topics. Table 1 categorizes the words used between undergraduates and faculty in order to more easily display the differences between both groups. The last two categories are a little vague- informal language relates to any time in which the participants shortened their words (example: “u” for “you”). Formal language relates to any time in which participants used words often meant to be polite (example: Mr. or Mrs.).

Figure 5: Pie Chart Denoting Undergraduate Code-Switching Circumstances (Casual Conversation: 27, Class Discussion: 7, I never realized it: 1); n = 35

In our survey, we asked both parties under which circumstance they code-switched in more to see if it may provide an explanation for the texting outcomes we obtained. For example, perhaps faculty talked about citizenship and taxes because they were talking to employers, and maybe undergraduates spoke about getting waitlisted and class because they were codeswitching during class discussions. Yet our survey results show that most students code-switch in casual conversation with their friends, with only 20% of undergraduates code-switching during class-related activities.

Figure 6: Pie Chart Denoting Faculty/Professor Code-Switching Circumstances (Casual Conversation: 6, Class Discussion: 0, I never realized it: 1); n = 7

Here, our hypothesis is once again proven wrong, displaying that none of our older participants code-switched with employers but instead solely during casual conversation. There was an option to state where else they code-switch, but all other participants (except for those who couldn’t recall or stated they didn’t realize it) said that they only code-switch among friends and family during casual conversation.

Figure 7: Pie Chart Denoting Audience of Undergraduate Code-switching (Family: 6, Friends: 12, Both: 9, Others: 8); n = 35

Using the same dataset, we made another distinction between undergraduate students and faculty members using one of the questionnaires from the survey: To which specific audience did you code-switch to more often? There are four variables that we chose to analyze, which are Friends, Family, Both, and others. The data of “others” include answers like, “teachers,” “people my age who look ethnically similar to me,” and “work environment.” The pie-chart above represents the data of undergraduate students. Based on the chart, we could tell how undergrads tend to CS with friends the most, followed by both friends and family (2nd), others (3rd), and family (4th). This corroborates the notion that bilingual undergraduate students are more likely to engage in code-switching during informal settings, such as chatting with friends, rather than in more intimate settings, like family discussions.

Figure 8: Pie Chart Denoting Audience of Faculty/Professor Code-switching (Family: 3, Friends: 2, Both: 2, Others: 0); n = 7

Next, this is another pie-chart that represents the data of faculty members and professors. Based on the chart, we could tell that UCLA faculty members and professors tend to CS with family members the most, followed by both (2nd), friends (2nd), and others (3rd). In contrast to the data regarding undergraduates, it is evident that faculty members tend to code-switch more frequently in personal settings, such as family conversations.

Conclusion

This research focused on the possibility of age affecting the way that bilinguals code-switch, both in content and environment. Through analysis of text messages and survey data, we were able to display some common bilingual texting patterns in UCLA undergraduates and faculty. Our research showed that bilingual people, regardless of age, do tend to transition between languages in casual conversations rather than in more formal, workplace or educational, situations. However, we saw some intriguing contrasts in the subjects that younger and older bilinguals code-switched about. It seems that when talking about less casual subjects, like political issues and business, older bilinguals are more inclined to switch languages. This could be the result of having more exposure to these kinds of interactions, while younger bilinguals may not code-switch in these certain situations because they have not yet encountered these themes as frequently. Our research also revealed that bilinguals’ code-switching behavior is influenced by the setting in which they are in. In casual situations, like conversations with friends, bilingual undergraduates tend to engage in code-switching more frequently than the faculty, who tend to reserve code-switching for more personal environments, such as with their families. The complexity of bilingualism and code-switching, as well as the ways that environment and age can affect these behaviors, are highlighted by our study. Understanding these subtleties is crucial for efficient communication and social integration in an increasingly linked society.

Although it seems as if most bilingual individuals, no matter the age, code-switch in casual conversations, older bilinguals tend to code-switch when talking about less casual topics, such as political issues and business, while younger bilinguals code-switch about daily life issues, like where to get lunch next.

References

Bahous, R. N., Nabhani, M. B., & Bacha, N. N. (2013, August 20). Code-switching in higher education in a multilingual environment: a Lebanese exploratory study. Language Awareness, 23(4), 353–368. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658416.2013.828735

Bhatti, A., Shamsudin, S., & Said, S. B. M. (2018, May 14). Code-Switching: A Useful Foreign Language Teaching Tool in EFL Classrooms. English Language Teaching, 11(6), 93. https://doi.org/10.5539/elt.v11n6p93

Ellison, T. M., & Si, A. (2021, June 28). A quantitative analysis of age-related differences in Hindi–English code-switching. International Journal of Bilingualism, 25(6), 1510–1528. https://doi.org/10.1177/13670069211028311

Jagero, N., & Odongo, E. K. (2011, March 30). Patterns and Motivations of Code Switching among Male and Female in Different Ranks and Age Groups in Nairobi Kenya. International Journal of Linguistics, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.5296/ijl.v3i1.1164

Mabule, D. R. (2015). What is this? Is It Code Switching, Code Mixing or Language Alternating? Journal of Educational and Social Research. https://doi.org/10.5901/jesr.2015.v5n1p339

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age, bilingualism, bilinguals, Code-Switching, texting

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Bilingualism

Roni Grushkevich, Iffet Dogan, Isaac Verdugo, Nandana Suresh

The following research on receptive multilingualism seeks to observe if exposure to popular Spanish singing artists of various dialects impact Spanish heritage and non-Spanish heritage speakers’ ability to comprehend their song’s lyrics. 8 participants (4 native Spanish speakers, 2 romance language speakers, and 2 individuals who learned Spanish in school) were given a combination of a C-test and song test via Google survey. The C-test was administered to standardize the level of basic Spanish comprehension across the participants. 3 separate song tests were made for each of the following Spanish singing artists of different Spanish dialects: Vicente Fernandez (Mexican), Bad Bunny (Puerto Rican), and Shakira (Columbian), containing their most popular song. Out of the 8 participants, only 25% of them stated to have relied on their romance language in order to comprehend Spanish. Direct translations were uncommon, however, interpretations of the music were accurate. The results from the study suggest that heritage Spanish speakers were able to comprehend more than their non-heritage counterparts.

Introduction and Background

Can exposure to various dialects within the context of music impact a Spanish speaker’s ability to comprehend lyrics of a dialect they can not necessarily speak? As widely known global sensations, Bad Bunny, Vicente Fernandez, and Shakira are enjoyed by speakers of various languages. These artists, Bad Bunny originating from Puerto Rico, Vicente Fernandez from Mexico, and Shakira from Columbia, sing in various dialects of Spanish and have the potential to subliminally impact non Spanish heritage and Spanish heritage speaker’s ability to comprehend Spanish from exposure alone. This phenomenon relates to receptive multilingualism, which refers to a mode of interaction wherein people can use a language or language variety that the person with whom they are communicating does not speak, without compromising any understanding between both parties, and without the use of any additional lingua franca (Rehbein et al. 2011). This essentially means that people who have been exposed to a particular language can develop the ability to understand it, without necessarily being able to speak it. This phenomenon allows for different, varied modes of communication, especially between speakers of similar languages and dialects, who may be able to understand each other while not speaking each others’ mother tongues. Similar research on this topic has revealed mixed findings. A study by Gooskens & Heeringa (2014), found that Norwegian speakers, who tend to be more exposed to different dialects of Norwegian, were better at translating texts in other Scandinavian languages than Danish speakers. In Sloboda & Nábělková (2013), the researchers found that in online spaces, there were mixed results on whether Slovak is intelligible to Czech speakers. The following research differs from existing findings as it focuses on receptive multilingualism within the context of music, focusing on heritage and non-heritage Spanish speakers specifically. We predict that through receptive multilingualism, Spanish heritage speakers will have the highest comprehension of song lyrics of various dialects; however, non-heritage speakers will have some level of comprehension through learned Spanish or familiarity with Spanish.

From left to right: Shakira, Bad Bunny, Vicente Fernández

Methods

Our participants were composed of both heritage Spanish speakers and non-heritage Spanish speakers. Participants were not asked to report their age or other demographic information. All of our participants are based in Los Angeles, California and were UCLA students. We got our participants by asking individuals who we know meet the requirements and asking individuals enrolled in a UCLA Italian course. We ended up having 8 participants (4 heritage Spanish speakers, 2 romance language speakers, and 2 individuals that learned Spanish in school). Non-native Spanish speakers were asked to report if they had received formal education in Spanish and if they did not speak Spanish, what Romance language they did speak.

We were able to conduct our study via C-test and song test, both of which were presented to the participants online in one survey. A C-test is a tool to measure language proficiency and this shows us where the participant’s levels of proficiency in Spanish is placed. We used the C-test from an online source (One to One Spanish). We chose to have this C-test in Spanish because it would allow us to compare our participants although they all come from different backgrounds. The entire C-test is multiple choice but we asked each participant to explain what skills they used to answer the questions.

The second part of the Google survey consisted of a set of questions that revolved around a song by one of the Spanish language artists, Vicente Fernandez, Bad Bunny, and Shakira. The participant was given a survey with one of the artists that does not sing in the variation of Spanish that they are privy to in the case that they are one of the heritage speakers of that variation. For example, a heritage Mexican-Spanish speaker was not given Vicente Fernandez as their musical artist to interpret. Moreover, each participant was pre-screened and elaborated on which type of Spanish they are familiar with/speak in order to select the song from an artist who sings in a variation of Spanish they’re unfamiliar with. The survey asked questions like what variation of Spanish they speak, if they have ever taken a Spanish-language class, if they have studied another romance language and to what level. Upon answering these questions, the participant listened to a section of the song they were given. Upon listening to the section of the song, the survey asked participants what they remember hearing from the song and followed up with asking the participant how they would translate what they heard into English and if they could not do so, how would they interpret what they heard. Lastly, they were asked how they came to this interpretation. We anticipated word chunks to be an important element in the analysis because of the similarities some words have with a similar romance language which would contribute to the receptive multilingualism. We evaluated the amount of word chunks that they were able to register in each survey. We accounted for the amount of word chunks they input as well as the frequency of entire sentences they input among the three different songs.

Results / Analysis

Based on our results, it is clear that our participants scored fairly well on the C-test. Out of nine questions, we were able to compare participants’ comprehension of Spanish in comparison to each other. As shown by Figure 1, the heritage Spanish speakers and romance language speakers performed better on average in comparison to the non-native Spanish speakers. This is something that we predicted when creating our study. This could be due to the fact that the heritage and romance speakers have more background with Spanish and have better knowledge to apply when taking the C-test. It is important to note that the non-heritage Spanish speakers scored exactly where we predicted they would. With some prior knowledge in Spanish, averaging a 5.5/9 on the C-test is fairly high.

Figure 1 aims to see if there is a correlation between the score participants got on the C-test and the number of words/chunks they identified in the second part of the Google survey when listening to the song. It is clear that heritage Spanish speakers performed the best at identifying words/chunks out of the song they heard. One surprising thing we do see in the graph is that the romance language speakers did much better on the C-test portion in comparison to the music component. This could be due to the fact that the C-test relies more on recall because it is multiple choice. This means that romance language speakers see the options listed which could help them reach the right answer. However, when needing to write chunks/words they remember, it is a much harder task that requires more knowledge of Spanish.

Overall, Figure 1 proves the fact that the performance on C-test is highly correlated to the way participants performed on the song test.

Figure 1. Shows correlation between the score participants got on their C-test and how well they performed on the second part of the Google survey.

Below is a column chart that displays the amount of participants that were able to register word chunks, entire sentences, and no sentences or word chunks. The heritage Spanish speakers were able to register more word chunks and entire sentences than their non-heritage counterparts.

Figure 2. Column chart with participant’s results.

The excerpts from each song were less than 15 seconds each and displayed roughly three whole sentences. Vicente Fernández’s Volver Volver included the lyrics “Nos dejamos hace tiempo pero me llegó el momento de perder. Tú tenías mucha razón le hago caso al corazón y me muero por volver.” Our two participants that were given the song Volver,Volver comprehended a good amount of lyrics that they were able to translate into small pieces of information like word chunks. Their knowledge of pop-culture and their respective romance language backgrounds were able to assist them in their interpretations of the song and lyrics. Bad Bunny’s Gato de noche exhibited the following lyrics from the excerpt “Tú ere’ mi loca y hoy te toca la terapia si no se lo meto le da rabia puedo tener más de veinte pero tú ere’ mi bichota, tú ere’ mi sicaria tanto’ pece’ en el mar”. Three heritage Spanish-speakers were able to register the entirety of the song excerpt; however, they did not register every word. Their knowledge in Spanish and the use of context clues based off of that knowledge was able to assist them in their interpretation of the song. The one non-heritage Spanish speaker that was given the Bad Bunny excerpt registered a few word chunks but did not succeed in translating the excerpt entirely. They did mention that their romance language assisted them in their interpretation and therefore led to their response aligning with what the lyrics entailed.

Shakira’s La Tortura was given to two participants, both of whom are heritage-Spanish speakers. The following lyrics were exhibited in the excerpt: “Ay amor me duele tanto, me duele tanto. Que tú fueres sin decir a dónde ay amor fue una tortura perderte.” The two participants had very accurate translations of the excerpt as well as the amount of word chunks and sentences they were able to register. Both of them translated the lyrics and their interpretation of the excerpt was accurate. They stated that their background in Spanish was the main reason for their accurate responses. Out of the eight participants, only 25% of them stated to have relied on their romance language in order to comprehend Spanish. Direct translations were uncommon, however, interpretations of the music were accurate.

The findings of the data suggest that heritage Spanish speakers were able to comprehend more than their non-heritage counterparts. Given that we received eight responses, it is not clear whether or not the findings reflect this on a macro level.

Discussion and Conclusions

Overall, while our C-test results were mixed, there certainly was a positive correlation between one’s prior exposure to Spanish and the amount of words they were able to translate during the music component of this experiment. This shows that, for the romance language speakers and non-native Spanish speakers, the prior exposure that they may have had to Spanish or another romance language probably did help them translate the song lyrics that were given to them, especially when we consider the fact that, even though many of the non-native Spanish speakers were not able to perfectly translate the lyrics, a large proportion of them were still able to accurately understand the meaning of the song lyrics. In essence, while they may not have been able to understand the meaning of each individual word, they may have been able to use what they did know, in conjunction with context clues, to make an educated guess as to what the general meaning of the lyrics were.

As it turns out, this is a strategy that many of our participants reported that they were able to follow, in that they described being able to recognize some of the more “important” content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs), and use them to their advantage. These words happened to be those that were either well known to non-Spanish speakers, such as loca, or those that share a similar form to their counterparts in English or other romance languages. From there, they described being able to use context clues to help them derive the meaning of the surrounding word chunk. Aside from this, there were some non-linguistic aspects of each song that may have somewhat aided the participants in their translations, in that features like tone, rhythm, tempo, etc. may have helped them identify the mood, and likely subject matter of the song. we did not see this described in our data enough, though, to make any concrete conclusions surrounding this.

However, when discussing this experiment, it is important to consider factors such as formal education that may have skewed our data—many of our non-native Spanish speakers had taken Spanish to quite a high level in the past, which can explain the relatively high proficiency that was found in their C-test results, and may have boosted their ability in the song lyric task as well. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since it doesn’t disprove that receptive multilingualism is the underlying mechanism in their success in these tasks. In terms of better understanding the strength of receptive multilingualism, though, we would probably have wanted to include participants who had less, but still some, exposure to Spanish. In this way, we would have been able to draw stronger conclusions from the data we collected—if people who had a very basic level of formal exposure to Spanish were still able to understand the meaning of the song lyrics, while likely performing poorly on the C-test, it would ultimately mean that their receptive capabilities were the main reason as to why they were able to understand the lyrics.

Additionally, only two out of the three videos we used to present the songs to the participants contained closed captions, which definitely showed in our data. We noticed that while most participants were able to understand the lyrics of the songs that contained closed captions, the participants that were assigned to the song that did not have closed captions struggled considerably with recognizing words and translating lyrics as a whole. This is not particularly surprising—while many words may share written forms between English, Spanish, and other Romance languages, they don’t necessarily sound similar. Because of this, when participants were forced to rely purely upon auditory stimuli during the music component, they may not have recognized some words that they would have recognized if they had access to closed captions while listening. In terms of receptive multilingualism, this indicates that people’s receptive abilities are stronger when they have both audio and visual input, as opposed to just audio input, as it makes it easier to make connections between the words in the received language and their counterparts in their native languages.

While we cannot make any claims about whether this makes it easier to then learn these words in the received language, perhaps, in the future, doing something like adding closed captions to all songs would help people understand their lyrics, even if they don’t speak the language that the song is sung in. Thus, receptive multilingualism can be a powerful tool in understanding non-native languages especially when considering songs and other forms of media, because we have various amounts of ways in which we can present information to listeners to aid their understanding of the material, no matter what their background may be.

Appendix

Comprehension Test

Survey Inquiry

References

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C-test, dialect, heritage speakers, Media, music

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