School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
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ItemBilingual language practices in a migrant community: language shift and code-switching in a Serbian language community in Melbourne, Australia( 2005)The dissertation describes bilingual language practices in a Serbian language community in Melbourne, Australia at the macro-social and the micro-interactional level. The analysis is based on sociolinguistic interviews with twenty first and second generation female Serbian-English bilinguals. All twenty participants are members of the same church-school community, referred to in the study as the St Vitus community. Patterns of language choice at the community level, expressed as ratings on a maintenance to shift continuum, suggest an ongoing intergenerational shift to English. Features of bilinguals' social networks are revealed to be strongly implicated in the maintenance of Serbian. In particular, statistically significant correlations are found to exist between bilinguals' language maintenance ratings, on the one hand, and the ratio of primary network contacts to whom bilinguals report using Serbian to contacts to whom use of English is reported and bilinguals' involvement in practices that foster language maintenance, expressed in terms of degree of community integration, on the other. Code-switching practices are revealed to have both participant-related and discourse-related functions in conversation. The sequential analysis of code-switching is situated within a structural description of the phenomena of Serbian-English bilingual speech, creating an opportunity to explore the difference between external, i.e. conversational, motivation for language contact phenomena and motivation internal to the bilingual grammar. The dissertation makes a contribution to the study of language maintenance and shift in providing further evidence of the significance of bilinguals' social networks. It demonstrates the interaction of the structural and the sequential levels of analysis and its importance for a more complete understanding of the phenomena of bilingual speech. Finally, the dissertation adds to the growing body of research on community languages in Australia.