Doing being bilingual: Language maintenance, language shift, and conversational codeswitching in southwest Detroit

What is doing being bilingual? Auer (1984) claims that "You cannot be bilingual in your head, you have to use two or more languages 'on stage', in interaction, to show others that and how you can use them" (7). Harvey Sacks, one of the founders of Conversation Analysis prefixed presumed mental activities or static identities with the word "doing" in order to highlight the interactional nature (Auer 1984: 7). In this way, the title of this dissertation attempts to communicate a focus on the interactional aspect of bilingualism.;In this dissertation, I examine the bilingual language practices in a small, heterogeneous, urban Latino community in the Midwestern United States. The analysis is based on interview, questionnaire, and spontaneous conversation data. The main goal of the dissertation is to effectively describe two levels of the community's language practices. The first level is that of global language choice; in other words, what factors affect Spanish language maintenance in immigrant and U.S. born informants. The data suggest that individual variables such as age at time of arrival have the most significant impact on the Spanish language maintenance of Group 1/Latin American informants, while social network variables have the most significant impact on the Spanish language maintenance of Group 2/U.S. born informants. The second level is that of language use in interaction; that is, to describe how bilingual speakers use English and Spanish to manage conversation. An examination of the codeswitching in spontaneous conversation in Southwest Detroit from a conversation analytic approach suggests that bilinguals use Spanish and English in order to manage talk-in-interaction (turn-taking organization, sequence organization, repair organization and preference organization) and identity-in-interaction (preference-related codeswitching, competence-related codeswitching, and crossing). The descriptions of the macro-social and micro-interactional levels inform each other, combining to provide a more profound understanding of how Latinos in Southwest Detroit employ the language varieties in their community's linguistic repertoire in order to co-construct and negotiate their identities, their relationships and their lives.