Spelling Bilingualism: Script Choice in Russian American Classified Ads and Signage  

Oleh:

Angermeyer, Philipp Sebastian

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language in Society (ada di PROQUEST) vol. 34 no. 4 (Sep. 2005), page 493-531.
Fulltext: 4169446.pdf (4.39MB)

Isi artikel

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.

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