Linguistic Patterns in the Northeast Georgia Hispanic Community

Data obtained from the sample of 56 Hispanic community members reveal language patterns including those who speak only Spanish, those who speak only English, and those who codeswitch (using words/morphemes from the two languages in sentences, conversations, and other oral texts) and/or mix the languages grammatically (grammatical convergence, the use of grammatical structures in the same sentence, such as word order, from more than one language but with morphemes exclusively from one of the languages). The models from Chapter 1 are used to describe and explain the data linguistically. Conversational turns exclusively in Spanish are the majority of the language data. All English turns are the second most frequent type of data. The category of all other conversational turns counted together, with any kind of mixing of the two languages, including code-switching and grammatical convergence, is less frequently encountered in the data than either the category of all Spanish or all English conversational turns. Within this third category of language mixing, the most frequent type of mixing is the insertion or embedding of single English words or content morphemes into matrix language Spanish sentences. Less frequent are conversational turns with codeswitches between multi-morpheme phrases or between sentences. Slightly less frequent are turns with grammatical convergence of Spanish and English. The least frequent type of mixing is English matrix language sentences with embedded Spanish words or morphemes.