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Article published In:
Spanish in Context
Vol. 14:1 (2017) ► pp.78–98

Language choice and accommodation

Casual encounters in San Ysidro and Nogales

| The University of Arizona

The present study investigates language choice in two bilingual speech communities in the United States: Nogales, AZ and San Ysidro, CA. Ethnically distinct fieldworkers approached members of these two communities under the guise of being lost tourists in order to engage in casual speech encounters. It was found that language choice varied between the two communities, with participants of the San Ysidro community more likely to engage in codeswitching. Ethnicity was also found to be a significant predictor of language choice, with more codeswitching taking place with the fieldworker of a Hispanic phenotype. Potential explanations and factors for future research are discussed.

Keywords: language choice, casual encounters, codeswitching, US Spanish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Speech accommodation theory
    • 1.2Previous research
    • 1.3The speech communities
    • 1.4The present study
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Data collection
    • 2.2Questionnaire
  • 3.Results
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 4 May 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.14.1.04bes
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