Language Competition and Shift in New Australia, Paraguay

This book is an innovative sociolinguistic study of New Australia, an Australian immigrant community in Paraguay in 1893, whose descendants today speak Guarani. Providing fresh data on a previously under-researched community who are an extremely rare case of language shifting from English heritage language to a local indigenous language, the case study is situated within the wider context of the colonial and post-colonial spread of English in Latin America over the past century. Drawing on insights from linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, Latin American studies and history, the author presents the history of the colony before closely analysing the interplay of language and identity in this uniquely diasporic setting. This book fills a longstanding gap in the World Englishes and heritage languages literature, and it will be of interest to scholars of colonial and postcolonial languages, and minority language more generally.

Draws on research into language contact, competition, and maintenance, and discusses the factors that determine these processes Contextualizes a single, previously unresearched case study as part of the spread of colonial languages in Latin America Assesses the different colonial experiences of Spanish and English on the South American continent Hypothesises that the vitality of Spanish in the face of the spread of English can be partly explained by its high value of solidarity among speakers

Autorentext

Danae Perez is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her research interests include contact linguistics, creolistics, language typology, and linguistic anthropology.

Inhalt
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Language Contact and English in Latin America.- Chapter 3: Approaching New Australia from Within and Without.- Chapter 4: Off to New Australia.- Chapter 5: New Australians in Paraguay.- Chapter 6: Language Shift in New Australia.- Chapter 7: On the Role of English in Nueva Australia Today.- Chapter 8: Concluding Remarks and Outlook.