Stock Status: Temporarily out of stock. To be ordered in from the Publisher
Published 2007.
Bilinguals often report that they feel like a different person in their two languages. In the words of one bilingual in Koven's book, ?When I speak
...
Published 2007.
Bilinguals often report that they feel like a different person in their two languages. In the words of one bilingual in Koven's book, ?When I speak
Portuguese, automatically, I'm in a different world?it's a different color.? Although testimonials like this abound in everyday conversation among
bilinguals, there has been scant systematic investigation of this intriguing phenomenon. Focusing on French-Portuguese bilinguals, the adult children of
Portuguese migrants in France, this book provides an empirically grounded, theoretical account of how the same speakers enact, experience, and are
perceived by others to have different identities in their two languages.
This book explores bilinguals' experiences and expressions of identity in multicultural, multilingual contexts. It is distinctive in its integration of
multiple levels of analysis to address the relationships between language and identity. Koven links detailed attention to discourse form, to participants'
multiple interpretations how such forms become signs of identity, and to the broader macrosociolinguistic contexts that structure participants' access to
those signs. The study of how bilinguals perform and experience different identities in their two languages sheds light on the more general role of
linguistic and cultural forms in local experiences and expressions of identity.
