Bücher der Reihe Oxford Studies in Language Contact

Spanish, the language of the conquerors, is now subordinate to English in California. Carmen Silva-Corvalan's book makes an original contribution to our growing knowledge of processes involved in language maintenance, shift, and loss by examining the Spanish spoken by an intergenerational sample of Mexican-American bilinguals in Los Angeles County.

Lanza examines in detail the simultaneous acquisition of English and Norwegian by two first-born children with American mothers living in Norway. She also addresses whether language mixing in infants is conceptually different from codeswitching.

This book deals with codeswitching - the use of two or more different languages in the same conversation. Using data from multilingual African contexts, Carol Myers-Scotton advances an original theory applicable to any society: speakers change languages in order to negotiate a change in the tenor of the conversation, conveying warmth or anger, solidarity or power, by their linguistic choices.