Increasingly, speakers of minoritized languages around the world are becoming uprooted due to economic pressures, political forces, and environmental destabilization. As communities leave their traditional homelands, they often experience accelerated language shift. Although youth are in a critical position to further transmit their languages to…

This dissertation examines the linguistic behavior of code-switching in three groups of highly proficient Cantonese-English bilinguals. Code-switching refers to alternating between two or more languages within the same sentence or between two sentences. While traditional research on bilingualism often compares bilingual speakers against…

This dissertation documents a collection of sociolinguistic and sociophonetic studies of the speech of bilingual Korean Americans in California. Korean Americans are an ethnic minority in the United States whose speech patterns in Korean and English remain understudied. The goal of the studies is to begin sketching out the acoustic traits that…

The objective of the current study is to contribute to the larger body of sociophonetic variation research by describing and analyzing Spanish as spoken in a small Puerto Rican community in the US. First, I describe phonological and morphosyntactic features of Spanish as used by four different groups of Puerto Rican informants in Amsterdam, New…

This study compares monolinguals and different kinds of bilinguals with respect to their knowledge of the type of lexical phenomenon known as collocation. Collocations are word combinations that speakers use recurrently, forming the basis of conventionalized lexical patterns that are shared by a linguistic community. Examples of collocations…

This morphosyntactic dissertation study compares the use of MOOD (indicative & subjunctive) in first- and second-generation Spanish speakers in New York City. The data for this study are from a transcription of naturalistic Spanish conversations with New Yorkers of different generations, representing the six primary Spanish-speaking groups in…

This study examines a major linguistic event underway in New York City. Of its 10 million inhabitants, nearly a third are speakers of Spanish. This community is socially and linguistically diverse: Some speakers are recent arrivals from Latin America while others are lifelong New Yorkers. Some have origins in the Caribbean, the historic source of…

This dissertation is a sociolinguistic study of the ideologies about language, culture and ethnicity among Japanese immigrants and descendants in Brazil (hereafter, Nikkeis) who gather at a local Japanese cultural association, searching for what it means to be "Japanese" in Brazil. This study focuses on how linguistic behaviors are…

This study documents and accounts for maintenance and change in dialectal features of Salvadoran Spanish in the United States, especially "voseo", as opposed to "tuteo", terms signifying the use of the second person singular familiar pronouns vos and tu , with their corresponding verb forms. It compares two distinct Salvadoran…

This study presents a broad overview of diasporic biliteracy developments in immigrant women after examining observation data in one Taiwanese community. Methodologies include a mixture of narrative inquiry with some ethnographic methods. Fifteen Asian women in diaspora, two Burmese, one Cambodian, one Filipino, four Indonesians, three Thai and…

In this dissertation, the denaturalization of migrants in the US and Italy as represented in newspaper crime reports was identified and compared to the opposing naturalization of Italian crime organizations in Italy and Wall Street/corporate criminals in the US. This was accomplished through careful, multidisciplinary, scientific analysis of over…

The purpose of this dissertation was to conduct a sociocultural linguistic study on Ethiopian immigrants in the Denver metropolis. It specifically examined language practice of Ethiopian immigrants at home and in church. The study centered on three Ethiopian Orthodox parish churches, taken as separate communities of practice. The study was…

The contact between Dominicans and Puerto Ricans is targeted for study as much for its linguistic import as for its social context. Dominican and Puerto Rican Spanish are considered varieties of Caribbean Spanish that differ only by a few phonological and syntactic patterns and a small number of lexical items. Although both varieties are heavily…