Relationship of the Social (Extralinguistic) Factors to the Grammatical (Linguistic) Patterns

Social (extralinguistic) and associated linguistic patterns from data from the 56 speaker sample in the Northeast Georgia Hispanic community are noted. Again, the models from Chapter 1 are used to describe and to explain the data. Age and gender correlate with language type use in that children of either gender and females of either age group use English and Spanish influenced by English (English-influenced types) more than the older group of informants of either gender or males of either age group. More speakers in the Hispanic community of non-Mexican origin are observed to use more English than speakers of Mexican origin. More non-Mexican as compared to Mexican English interaction may therefore be related to higher convergence rates, especially among South Americans and Guatemalans who showed the highest grammatical convergence rates of all regional groups. On the other hand, usage of code-switching was significantly greater by Mexicans as a group, younger informants, and by those informants who reported more preference for English. Correlations of the language data to the other social factors presented in Chapter 2 are also noted.