| This dissertation undertakes the examination of two embedded languages against a matrix language. It provides a comparative and sociolinguistic description of language contact phenomena among German and Hungarian speakers in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. The linguistic and biographical data were gathered by fieldwork. The study approaches the problem from an interdisciplinary angle, combining anthropological and linguistic frameworks, and is based on a questionnaire of 25 utterances elicited from twenty consultants of each language. In the larger contact-linguistic context of examining a particular stage in the attrition/loss process of these immigrant speakers who live in a non-native linguistic and cultural environment, my aim is to research how these two non-related languages react to the pressures of the matrix language English.; Through the investigated differences and similarities in the structural transformation of German and Hungarian, new insights are offered about the behavioral characteristics of these languages in contact settings (chapters 3, 5 and 7). The fieldwork questionnaire focuses on the grammatical areas pragmatics, lexicon, morphology, and syntax. Phonetic information is not included. Chapters 3 and 5 taxonomically organize the changes that the structures of these languages undergo, and, in chapter 7, I contrast these results. This latter chapter also sheds light on features and properties that tend to be susceptible to change and loss, and points out those that are more resistant. In other words, the characteristic tendencies and dominant statistics are highlighted within the individual languages first, followed by an inter-linguistic comparison of the findings.; Grammatical violations that are typical of the first vs. successive generations are summarized and illustrated in sections 3.3 and 5.3. Accordingly, emphasis is placed on the separation of bilingual vs. interlingual results. Chapter 7 confirms the hypothesis that those grammatical features of German and Hungarian that typically pose hurdles in language learning (such as German case and gender marking vs. Hungarian agglutination or subjective and objective conjugation) get lost early in the attrition/shift process. Chapters 3 and 5, and appendices B and C show that the recorded contact-linguistic phenomena result partly from attrition-related deterioration, and partly from English interference. In chapters 4 and 6, the biographical and sociolinguistic data of the participants are scrutinized, and those characteristics are stressed that support the grammatical data. Section 2.3 describes the bilingual and bicultural experience of the informants. It also examines whether, in the light of the attested linguistic demise, long-term language retention is a plausible prospect of expatriate speech communities that are widely confronted with the replacive role of English. |
