Contact phenomena in the Serbian community in New Zealand: The language of the first-generation bilinguals

Abstract

This thesis investigates the Serbian-English contact situation in New Zealand. It examines the language of 37 late bilinguals born in Serbia, who have been living in New Zealand for approximately ten to twenty years. Data for the analysis was collected in the 2004-2013 period, and comprises e-mail, text and Skype messages. Starting from Matras' (2009) functional approach, based on the view that language is a social activity and that communication is goal-driven, the study looks at the replication of English lexical matter items (MAT-replication) and their integration into Serbian, as well as at constructions which use Serbian lexemes but are modelled on English language patterns (PAT-replication). It investigates how the process of replication from English emerges in bilingual repertoires in New Zealand Serbian, and what factors contribute to this process. This study endorses Matras' argument that bilinguals, who have the repertoires of two languages at their disposal, exploit both of their languages, and make the most effective use of their full bilingual repertoire. This is particularly visible where lexical insertions are used consciously to achieve special conversational effects. Analysis shows that Serbian remains the pragmatically dominant language of first-generation Serbian immigrants in New Zealand, and supplies both the matrix and the morpho-syntactic frame. English is becoming stronger over time, and both MAT- and PAT-replications become more frequent. There is also an increase in innovations which are result of malfunctions in language selection, such as the borrowing of English-origin discourse markers, the loss of case markings in Serbian nouns, and failure to assign Serbian case markings to replicated English nouns. The study confirms that observed changes very much reflect creativity of individual participants, and that social factors have an important role in facilitating propagation of innovations in this bilingual community.