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From: "Michael Gasser" <gasser@cs.indiana.edu>
Subject: Re: How bilingual people choose a language
Message-ID: <1994Nov9.220434.29717@news.cs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Computer Science, Indiana University
References: <1994Sep22.144228.1@ctdvx5.priv.ornl.gov> <39q3lj$mj7@newsbf01.news.aol.com>
Date: Wed, 9 Nov 94 22:04:28 -0500
Lines: 22

In article <39q3lj$mj7@newsbf01.news.aol.com>, Bimrboy <bimrboy@aol.com> wrote:
>In article <1994Sep22.144228.1@ctdvx5.priv.ornl.gov>,
>s25@ctdvx5.priv.ornl.gov writes:
>
...
>
>One unusual phenomenon I observed in Florida is the tendency of many Cuban
>Americans to carry on a perfectly fluent conversation, among themselves,
>in which sentences alternate English/Spanish almost unconsciously. Yet the
>same people have no difficulty talking to a monolingual in just one of the
>two languages.

This phenomenon is not really unusual.  It's well-known in the
literature on fluent bilingualism and has been especially studied, I
believe, among Mexican-Americans in Texas, for whom the ability to
switch freely between English and Spanish seems to be viewed as a way
of fostering solidarity.

Mike Gasser



