Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T09:17:09.423Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Spelling bilingualism: Script choice in Russian American classified ads and signage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2005

PHILIPP SEBASTIAN ANGERMEYER
PHILIPP SEBASTIAN ANGERMEYER
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, New York University, New York, NY 10003-6860<,> [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article investigates the role of script choice in bilingual writing, drawing on classified advertisements and other texts written for and by Russian-speaking immigrants in New York City. The study focuses on English-origin items that appear in Russian texts, which are found to be written either in roman or Cyrillic script. Through an investigation of categorical and variable constraints on this variation, it is found that script choice relates to the distinction between lexical borrowing and single-item codeswitching. It is argued that writers may, consciously and on a token-by-token basis, choose the Cyrillic script to mark a word as borrowed or the roman script to mark it as foreign. However, they may also avoid this choice, as hybrid forms attest, especially when the use of characters shared by both alphabets allows ambiguous readings. The findings thus have implications for understanding notions of language boundaries in bilingual language use.Versions of this article were presented at two conferences: “Alphabetics: Interpreting letters” at Harvard University, 26–27 April 2003, and NWAVE 32, Philadelphia, 9–12 October 2003. I thank the audiences for their valuable insights and observations, especially Erika Boeckeler and Daniel Kokin. I also owe thanks to Katya Korsunskaya, Vladislav Rapoport, Doris Stolberg, Mario Geiger, and Tobias Kuhn. I am grateful to John Victor Singler, Mark Sebba, and Jannis K. Androutsopoulos, as well as to Jane H. Hill and to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. All errors and omissions remain my own.

Keywords

Writing systemsRussianEnglishcodeswitchingborrowinghybridity
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , October 2005 , pp. 493 - 531
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Andrews, David R. (1998). Sociocultural perspectives on language change in diaspora: Soviet immigrants in the United States. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2002). Greek on the Internet: Recent findings and research perspectives. Paper presented at Institut für Deutsche Sprache Mannheim, Research Group “Sprachvariation,” November 2002.
Auer, Peter (1998). Introduction: Bilingual Conversation revisited. In Peter Auer (ed.), Code-switching in conversation: Language, interaction and identity, 1–24. London: Routledge.
Auer, Peter (1999). From codeswitching via language mixing to fused lects: Toward a dynamic typology of bilingual speech. International Journal of Bilingualism 3:309–32.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1981 [1934-35]). Discourse in the novel. In Michael Holmquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, 259–422. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Banu, Rahela, & Sussex, Roland (2001). Code-switching in Bangladesh. English Today 17:51–61.Google Scholar
Bentahila, Abdelâli, & Davies, Eirlys E. (1991). Constraints on code-switching: A look beyond grammar. In ESF Network on Codeswitching and Language Contact. Papers for the Symposium on Codeswitching in Bilingual Studies: Theory, Significance and Perspectives, Barcelona, March 1991, 369–403. Strasbourg: European Science Foundation.
Birman, Igor (1979). Jewish immigration from the U.S.S.R.: Some observations. Soviet Jewish Affairs 9(2):46–63.Google Scholar
Budzhak-Jones, Svitlana (1998). Against word-internal codeswitching: Evidence from Ukrainian-English bilingualism. International Journal of Bilingualism 2:161–82.Google Scholar
Cheung, Yat-Shing (1992). The form and meaning of digraphia: The case of Chinese. In Kingsley Bolton & Helen Kwok (eds.), Sociolinguistics today: International perspectives, 207–17. London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall.
Clyne, Michael (1967). Transference and triggering: Observations on the language assimilation of postwar German-speaking migrants in Australia. The Hague: Nijhoff.
Clyne, Michael (1994). Discourse in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural contexts. In R.E. Asher & J.M.Y. Simpson (eds.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, 2: 958–64. Oxford: Pergamon.
Comrie, Bernard (1996). Adaptations of the Cyrillic alphabet. In Daniels & Bright, 700–26.
Cubberley, Paul (1996). The Slavic alphabets. In Daniels & Bright, 346–55.
Dale, Ian (1980). Digraphia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 26:5–13.Google Scholar
Daniels, Peter, & Bright, William (eds.) (1996). The world's writing systems. New York: Oxford University Press.
De Francis, John (1984). Digraphia. Word 35:325–40.Google Scholar
Eliasson, Stig (1990). Models and constraints in code-switching theory. In ESF Network on Codeswitching and Language Contact. Papers for the Workshop on Constraints, Conditions and Models, London, September 1990, 17–50. Strasbourg: European Science Foundation.
Feldman, Laura Beth, & Barac-Cikoja, Dragana (1996). Serbo-Croatian: A biscriptal language. In Daniels & Bright, 769–72.
Ferguson, Charles A. (1959). Diglossia. Word 15:325–40.Google Scholar
Fishman, Joshua A. (1967). Bilingualism with and without diglossia: Diglossia with and without bilingualism. Journal of Social Issues 23:29–38.Google Scholar
Gardner-Chloros, Penelope (1995). Code-switching in community, regional and national repertoires: The myth of the discreteness of linguistic systems. In Lesley Milroy & Pieter Muysken (eds.), One speaker, two languages: Cross-disciplinary perspectives on code-switching, 68–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gazda, Jiří (1998). K otázce konkurence grafických kódů v ruském publicistickém textu. [The issue of script competition in Russian journalistic texts.] Sborník Prací Filozofické Fakulty Brněnské Univerzity, Řada Jazykovědná A46, 161–68.
Gold, Steven J. (1995). From the workers' state to the golden state: Jews from the former Soviet Union in California. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Gregor, Esma (2002). Russian-English code-switching in New York City. Dissertation, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
Grivelet, Stéphane (2001). Introduction. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 150 (Special Issue: Digraphia: Writing systems and society): 1–10.Google Scholar
Heath, Jeffrey (1989). From code-switching to borrowing: foreign and diglossic mixing in Moroccan Arabic. London & York: Kegan Paul.
Hill, Jane H., & Hill, Kenneth C. (1986). Speaking Mexicano: Dynamics of syncretic language in Central Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Hinkel, Eli (2000). Soviet immigrants in the United States: Issues in adjustment. In Sandra Lee McKay & Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong (eds.), New immigrants in the United States: Readings for second language educators, 352–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jaffe, Alexandra (2000). Introduction: Non-standard orthography and non-standard speech. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4:497–513.Google Scholar
Johnson, Sally (2000). The cultural politics of the 1998 reform of German orthography. German Life and Letters 53:106–25.Google Scholar
Kress, Gunther (2000). Early spelling: Between convention and creativity. London: Routledge.
LaDousa, Chaise (2002). Advertising in the periphery: Languages and schools in a North Indian city. Language in Society 31:213–42.Google Scholar
Levkov, Ilya (1984). Adaptation and acculturation of Soviet Jews in the United States: A preliminary analysis. In Robert O. Freedman (ed.), Soviet Jewry in the decisive decade, 1971–80, 109–43. Durham: Duke University Press.
Li, David C. S. (2000). Phonetic borrowing: Key to the vitality of written Cantonese in Hong Kong. Written Language and Literacy 3:199–233.Google Scholar
Lubell, Stephen (1993). Bilingualism in the Hebrew text. Visible Language 27:163–204.Google Scholar
Magner, Thomas F. (2001). Digraphia in the territories of the Croats and Serbs. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 150:11–26.Google Scholar
Marian, Viorica, & Kaushanskaya, Margarita (2004). Mapping written input onto orthographic representations: The case of bilinguals with partially overlapping orthographies. Poster presented at the 26th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Chicago, August 5–7, 2004.
Milroy, James, & Milroy, Lesley (1991). Authority in language: Investigating language prescription and standardisation. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Muysken, Pieter (2000). Bilingual speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Myers-Scotton, Carol (1993). Duelling languages: Grammatical structure in codeswitching. Oxford & New York: Clarendon Press.
Orleck, Annelise (2001). Soviet Jews: The city's newest immigrants transform New York Jewish life. In Nancy Foner (ed.), New immigrants in New York, 111–40. Rev. ed., New York: Columbia University Press.
Piller, Ingrid (2003). Advertising as a site of language contact. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 23:170–83.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana (1980). Sometimes I'll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español: Toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics 18:581–618.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana, & Meechan, Marjory (1998). Introduction: How languages fit together in codemixing. International Journal of Bilingualism 2:127–38.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana, & Meechan, Marjory (1995). Patterns of language mixture: Nominal structure in Wolof-French and Fongbe-French bilingual discourse. In Lesley Milroy & Pieter Muysken (eds.), One speaker, two languages: Cross-disciplinary perspectives on code-switching, 199–232. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Poplack, Shana; Sankoff, David; & Miller, Christopher (1988). The social correlates and linguistic processes of lexical borrowing and assimilation. Linguistics 26:47–104.Google Scholar
Rand, David, & Sankoff, David (1990). Goldvarb, version 2: A variable rule application for the Macintosh. Montreal. Université de Montréal, Centre de recherches mathématiques.
Sankoff, David, & Poplack, Shana (1984). Borrowing: the synchrony of integration. Linguistics 22:99–136.Google Scholar
Sankoff, David; Poplack, Shana; & Vanniarajan, Swathi (1990). The case of the nonce loan in Tamil. Language Variation and Change 2:71–101.Google Scholar
Sebba, Mark (2002). Regulated spaces: Language alternation in writing. Paper presented at the 2nd International Symposium on Bilingualism, Vigo, October 23–26, 2002.
Sebba, Mark (2003). Ideology and alphabets in the former USSR. Center for Language in Social Life, Working Paper No. 123. Lancaster University, Department of English and Modern English Language.
Shell, Marc (1993). Children of the earth: Literature, politics and nationhood. New York: Oxford University Press.
Smith, Janet S. [Shibamoto] (1996). Japanese writing. In Daniels & Bright, 209–17.
Smith, Janet S. [Shibamoto], & Schmidt, David L. (1996). Variability in written Japanese: Towards a sociolinguistics of script choice. Visible Language 30:46–71.Google Scholar
Spraul, Hildegard (1999). Graphemik. In Helmut Jachnow (ed.), Handbuch der Sprachwissenschaftlichen Russistik und ihrer Grenzdisziplinen, 66–86. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Thomason, Sarah Grey (2001). Language contact. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Timm, L.A. (1978). Code switching in War and Peace. In M. Paradis (ed.), Aspects of bilingualism, 302–15. Columbia: Hornbeam.
Weinreich, Uriel (1968 [1953]). Languages in contact: Findings and problems. The Hague: Mouton.
Woolard, Kathryn A. (1999). Simultaneity and bivalency as strategies in bilingualism. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 8:3–29.Google Scholar
Zima, Petr (1974). Digraphia: The case of Hausa. Linguistics 124:57–69.Google Scholar