Language attrition and language maintenance: The case of Colombian immigrants in New York State

This dissertation explores the phenomenon of first language attrition in a second language environment. Data was collected from a group of first generation Colombian immigrants in three different locations of New York State. By comparing the Spanish spoken by these bilingual immigrants to the Spanish spoken by a group of monolinguals living in Colombia, I aim to determine to what extent and at what linguistic levels, first language attrition has occurred among bilinguals. I start by discussing relevant concepts such as: language contact, language shift, and language maintenance. Then, I present an overview of language attrition studies describing the internal and external factors involved in this phenomenon. I subsequently describe the sociolinguistic background of Spanish in the United States followed by a brief report on Hispanic immigration patterns, and a description of the most distinctive features of Colombian Spanish.;The results of this study indicate that first generation Colombian immigrants in New York State do not present signs of language attrition but some pragmatic changes due to exposure to English as well as to other Spanish dialects. These bilinguals register a high level of first language maintenance due to the fact that they keep using their native language for both integrative and instrumental processes. At the lexical and semantic level, data analysis revealed a few instances of L2 influence on Ll. Two changes at the morphosyntactic level were found to be recurrent in the bilingual group, namely: the use of Overt Subject Personal Pronouns and the use of the indefinite pronoun uno to express impersonal sentences. Quantitative analysis was carried out using SPSS looking for correlations of linguistic and extralinguistic factors and the difference in pronominal use.